Feedback on our new website design please

Feedback on our new website design please

10:07 AM, 27th July 2017, About 7 years ago 152

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This time last week we unveiled a fresh Property118 website design and new functionality to improve Navigation, searching and the general user experience.

One of the new features we have added is a ‘hover-over’ function which appears when your mouse cursor is placed over a members name or Avatar. The date of when the member joined Property118 and how many comments they have posted to date is then displayed. We think this will be particularly useful to established members who like to report inappropriate comments. Sadly, some people join forums and post antagonistic comments to wind people up. For some reason they get a kick out of it! Where such comments are reported a view is then taken by moderators on whether to remove the offending comment, and in extreme cases to expel the member and block their IP address so that they are unable to create a membership profile using an different name and email account.

Inevitably there were a few initial ‘bug-fixes’ to deal with when we first launched the new website and we are extremely grateful to members who took the time and effort to point these out to us. Hopefully, these have now all been resolved. We hope you will agree that the text font is now much easier to read for example, and to make bigger for those with less than 20:20 vision. Other fixes were to ensure that comment links pointed directly to the associated comment as opposed to the article and that login issues were resolved. We are still working on some image cropping issues.

There may still be things you spot which are slightly annoying or could be improved upon further, hence we would very much like you to tell us what these are.

Please leave comments below and rest assured that we take all user feedback very seriously and will do whatever we can to continue to improve your user experience.

Daily Newsletters were paused whilst we were ‘bug-fixing’ but will now resume for those who were previously receiving them and for all new members.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Neil Patterson – Managing Director of Property118 Limited


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Badger

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12:41 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 11:57You can extend this idea to add in other sections.

Within reason of course - perhaps up to four headings as a maximum would work so you could have:

Latest News '>'
Most Read '>'
Popular Discussions '>'
Related Articles 'V'

I would have 'Related Articles' as the default myself but that perhaps reflects my personal Property118 site usage more than anything else and you may have different priorities.

BTW - in my mind two headings definitely works. I am less clear on whether three or even four headings is a good idea. I would want to try it and see how it looks.

Hopefully, expense will not be too much of an issue in implementing a feature like this as the developers have already done the vast bulk of the work in getting these various existing lists to display in the first place.

Badger

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13:04 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 12:30Hmmm... well it had me fooled - hence my comment.

I don't like it as it breaks with what the PC user expects from his/her browser.

I recognise the importance of iPads and the like (heck I even own and use one myself) but this is one example of a negative effect being visited onto web site users by dint of designing for "devices" and is actually one of two** main reasons why I so dislike the idea of "apps".

I really dislike using web sites that have been primarily designed for ease of use on "devices" and avoid them wherever possible. Many a site has lost a sale to me as a result. In many ways this issue echoes the earlier one of the ease of use of the commenting system. People are generally fickle and easily put off if things are not made easy for them. Hence the need to ruthlessly focus on the user experience when it comes to web site design.

[ ** The other being that the functionality of apps tends to be a poor subset of what is achievable on a "traditional" web site implementation.]

Badger

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13:10 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 12:30Is this section currently being actively worked on?

Earlier today clicking this link presented a traditional "site map" kind of layout with links to all sections but it now seems to have been changed to something more akin to what one would expect on a web site optimised for devices and the links do not currently work.

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

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13:16 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 07/08/2017 - 13:10There have been no changes made today to the "View All sections" functionality and so far as a can tell with a very quick test all links are working

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

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13:26 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Possible solutions to help users to realise that Navigation it is a modal:-

1) Make the modal screen so big that it covers the entire screen including the back button

2) Switch from modal design on desktop to a physical page so the user has no choice but to use the back button or navigate to a new page

3) Make the modal smaller, centred over the page, to maker is clearer to the user that the Navigation is a modal

4) Add a "Close Navigation" button to the modal

Which do you recommend and why please?

Kathy Evans

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13:27 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 13:16As I said in an earlier reply, View all sections looks quite different in FF and Opera. Very neat and usable in Opera - just a neat list in columns - but in FF it is overs the entire screen in huge text (like a menu for a mobile device) so you have to scroll up and down to hit the links - vile!

Also in FF, the Popular Discussions appears on the right, but in Opera in appears underneath the comments and it is impossible to scroll to the bottom as it bounces you back up to the top of the section just before you get there.

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

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13:33 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Kathy Evans at 07/08/2017 - 13:27Hi Kathy

You might not like me for saying this but we are designing the website for the main browsers our users actually use. Less than 1% of them use Opera I'm afraid so that's not even on our list.

What I cannot understand is why you have having problems in Firefox, as it looks fine to me in the latest version, same with the latest version of Chrome, IE, Safari etc.

Kathy Evans

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13:42 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 13:33What ever happened to just writing compliant code instead of worrying about what browser someone has? I suspect that the way it looks in FF is how it is supposed to look, but It is horrid, and the way it looks in Opera is much nicer and more usable.

Badger

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13:44 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 13:26I would go for a combination of (3) & (4).

traditional web sites just don't do the modal thing like it currently is so it comes as a surprise and is disorientating.

Badger

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13:49 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 13:16Just one quick observation on the "new" / modified commenting system as of this morning (thanks very much) - please place the user's cursor focus in the comment box when scrolling them to the bottom of the page as a result of clicking on a 'Reply' link. Users that start typing without looking up and separately clicking into the 'Comment' box are liable to get their web page leaping all over the place as they enter characters which the browser then attempts to interpret as commands.

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