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April 27, 2023
Should we add pricing and "Best of"?
It's in the nature of tech sites such as RuggedPCReview.com to periodically review the operation and see if it's perhaps time to expand sections, add new things, update or retire this and that, and so on. It's then also time to review the tools and utilities used to manage the site, or perhaps switch to an entirely different system altogether.
As far as the latter goes, every three years or so we've contemplated switching from our "hand-coded" approach that goes back to the very beginning of RuggedPCReview.com almost two decades ago, to a more integrated website management system. That usually means WordPress, which is by far the leader in site creation and management. And each time the answer was a definite "no way." WordPress, of course, is powerful and has massive third-party support. It's a great system for many types of websites, but ours isn't one of them. We'll review that decision again, but I doubt that we'll come to a different conclusion.
But there are other things to consider.
One of them is if we should add price to the comprehensive spec sheet at the end of every one of our product reviews. That sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it really isn't. Pricing is so very relative. There's MSRP, the manufacturer's suggested retail price. There's "street" price. There are quantity discounts. And price always depends on configurations and options. Manufacturers often list a "starting at" price, and we've occasionally done that as well. But with computers, and especially rugged ones with all of their possible deployments and applications, "nicely equipped" can cost twice as much or more than the "starting at" price. Should we simply inquire with the manufacturer and see what they would like for us to list? Perhaps, and we've done that. Or should we just stay with "inquire"?
There's also the fact that, as fairly specialized and usually relatively low-volume products, rugged computing systems are not inexpensive. In an industry that's dealing with customers often contemplating purchasing much lower priced consumer electronics in a protective case, adding to "sticker shock" before prospective customers even consider total cost of ownership of rugged systems is not what we're after.
So much for the price issue. There's something else we've considered off and on. Publishing period "Best of" listings and awards. Everyone does that these days. Google "Best of xyz" and there's any number of web pages listing whatever they consider best. The fact alone that those lists almost always have Amazon buying buttons next to the products, i.e. the site gets a commission, will make you wonder about the legitimacy of such "Best of" lists.
Even relatively legitimate publications are doing those "Best of" lists and awards, and many of them are, well, questionable at best. We're seeing once legitimate and respected sites and publications now do "Best of" lists and awards where you truly have to wonder how they came to their conclusions. Cheap, basic white-box products that aren't even in the same class beating legitimate, well-established market leaders? Yup, seen it. Merrily mixing products that aren't even competing in the same category? Yup. Watering awards systems down so much that literally everyone gets some award? Yes. Hey, if you're the only semi-enterprise class 11.475-inch tablet available in ocean-blue and with two bumper options, you're the best of that category and deserve an award. Because who does not want to be "award-winning"?
Questions, questions.
Posted by conradb212 at 5:36 PM