We are pleased and excited to introduce our bold new site design—only the second major redesign since the Digital Media Zone’s inception in 2009. Keeping true to our roots of sharing what we’re personally most passionate about, we’ve made some sweeping changes to the site. We have a new look, new content organization, and what we believe is an overall better experience for finding and reading the information you care most about.
We’ve pulled back a bit from a traditional blog format, and we’re organizing our content more like a news and resource outlet now. You can still, ultimately, peruse our content in a timeline format if you’d like. But we’re also going to be doing more to surface the articles and shows that are of greatest interest to our community.
We’ve put together some highlights about the changes. Keep reading if you’re interested in finding out more.
Content-driven Navigation
Traditional blog categories can sometimes make it hard to find what you’re looking for. Is it a device, a service, a review? Maybe it’s all of those. To break down some of those barriers, we’re organizing our content into three major sections: Media, Gaming, and Connected Home. Each pulls together our articles and shows across multiple topics so it’s easier for you to find what interests you. You also have the ability to dig further into individual topics from there.
Media is home to everything that you’ve come to know and love about the DMZ—it’s our point of origin, and it’s now all under one roof. Whether you’re interested in streaming devices, music services, or network tuners, it’s all there. This is where you’ll find news, information, and reviews about the products and services that help you enjoy your digital media. And if you’re hanging on with Media Center, our legacy content is still all there for you.
Gaming is a growing area of interest at The Digital Media Zone. Between our new podcast, Story Players, and, of course, our heavy slant toward all things Xbox, this is an area that’s been getting a larger chunk of our time and attention. Expect to find news and reviews on games, consoles, and accessories here, as well as an occasional opinion piece.
Connected Home technology was a natural evolution from our DIY home theater roots. So we created a new section where you’ll find all of our posts about home automation, a new smart kitchen section, and our legacy home theater content.
Of course, if you want to dive right into our reviews, how-to’s, or opinion pieces, you can still do that too. Just look for the Features block in the sidebar, which lists topics that will take you right to that stuff.
Podcast Placement
We’ve come to realize that we spend a significant amount of the time that we dedicate to The Digital Media Zone recording and producing our podcasts. Our shows have evolved, and our audience has grown, but we’ve still treated podcasts just like every other post on the site. Our new Podcasts section changes that. Podcasts now get a special home of their own with supplementary content, and even advertising, that should be more applicable to their respective audiences. And our new readily-available, video-optimized Live page also makes it easier to jump right into the conversation when we record our shows live.
Unobtrusive Advertising
Like pretty much every other site out there, we pay the bills through affiliate advertising and sponsors. We also realize that much—perhaps even most—web advertising is annoying and invasive. So we pledge not to be. We clearly identify our ad blocks. We filter our ads and periodically review them for offensive or nefarious content. While we do use affiliate links on some products in posts, we won’t have those annoying hover popups.

Speaking of ad popups: None…ever. Auto-play videos with audio? Nope. And we always keep ad blocks on the periphery of our editorial content. Nobody wants to scroll past or accidentally click through to an ad between paragraphs. We hope you’ll white list our site if you do use an ad-blocker, and please let us know if you encounter an ad experience on the site that you believe is annoying or invasive.
Go Mobile or Go Home
We know that a growing segment of our audience reads and listens to our content on the go. With our new design, you can now get the full DMZ experience on the device of your choosing.
We’ve put a good amount of time into rethinking and retooling The Digital Media Zone to make it better for you and prepare us for the future. Please let us know what you think! Having trouble finding something or did you discover something that seems broken? Leave a comment below with your feedback, or feel free to reach out to us directly.