Feedback on our new website design please

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 06/08/2017 - 22:16Disqus is not the only game in town and I just offer it up as an example.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is other (quite possibly free or nearly so) software that comes close and certainly offers the kinds of facility that I mentioned.

Unfortunately, I am a bit out of the loop these days so I can't offer any suggestions as to suitable product names but I will see if I can do a little research later on.

Slight weirdness in the way that the page is formatted / displayed:

On my setup (Win 7 / Firefox - fully updated with the latest patches on both counts) when viewing forum pages (such as this very one that you are looking at now for example) the Property118 banner is not at the top of the page but (approximately) one line of text lower.

Not only is this a slight waste of screen real estate but the forum text can be seen to be scrolling behind the banner by dint of the fact that it appears above it as well.

Not a huge big deal but a bug is a bug all the same. 🙂

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 07/08/2017 - 11:04Now that one is strange. I'm using Firefox on Windows 10 and I'm not seeing that

Hi Badger,

I have seen this on Mike's PC and it was from an early cache when he was testing the site.
If you can blow your cache it then should look normal.
Many thanks

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 07/08/2017 - 10:53You've got me wondering now what's best to have in the floating panel. Should we have the Related Articles there and the Popular Discussions higher up, where the related articles are now, perhaps?

The only problem with that is only new articles have Related Articles assigned to them, hence users would have white-space again to the right when reading older threads. Maybe that's not such a big issue though? Hmmmmm!!!

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 06/08/2017 - 21:05Here's a classic example of why I dislike the '13 hours ago' style of timestamping.

All of my posts, at the time of writing this note, from yesterday evening are now timestamped '13 hours ago' when in fact they were separately timed of course.

"Why on earth can this possibly matter?" I hear the majority of the less anally retentive Property118 readership silently asking themselves? 🙂

Well, the answer is that it makes it very difficult for me (and even more difficult for others simply reading the thread without adding their own comments and surely this is the vast majority of readers) to work out which of my comments you are in turn commenting to. I know that one *CAN SOMETIMES* work it out (not always mind you) but that is to miss the point. People made to jump through hoops will often simply decline to do so and step around it instead. As a result, the overall experience is diminished for all.

It's worth observing that if one can find a forum management plug-in (and I'm sure that they exist at all price points - including 'free'**) that displays threads in such a way as to graphically illustrate how comments are related then the question of the exact time and date that the original message was posted at becomes less relevant. Not irrelevant, but less relevant.

On the general point of the value of focussing on ease of use for one's subscribers - compare the Amazon shopping experience to that of many other web sites. They really have it down to a fine art and buying things from Amazon is much slicker than pretty well any other web site. For those of us that are PayPal users eBay has also been almost as good for some time now and other sites that accept PayPal and also making things slicker and easier for those of us that are happy to use PayPal. Of course, these are billion dollar businesses with development budgets to match but once again to focus on this in a defeatist way would be to miss the point. The key thing to do (for developers who wish to serve their customers as best they possibly can) is to be aware of what others are getting up to and to engage a background process in the brain on a 24x7 basis thinking up wizard ways of emulating the best within the constraints of one's (customer's) own budget. Generally speaking, this is not something that one gets to charge the customer for but it is key to serving them as best you can and thus differentiating one's firm from the also rans. Consequently, it has to come about organically as a result of the energy drive and commitment of the individual developers and their personal passion to achieve the very best that they can. Easy to say but difficult to do so apologies for the unsolicited polemic.

Reply to the comment left by Neil Patterson at 07/08/2017 - 11:18Yes, but I do not want to clear my cache as I spend a large part of my day on many and various web sites and to lose all of that context because of a 'defect' in one site would be irritating.

(Unfortunately, Firefox does not appear to offer a 'per site' cache clearance option.)

If it is truly a cache related issue then it will likely resolve on its own over time anyway of course.

Either way, it's pretty minor in the overall scheme of things.

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 07/08/2017 - 11:32Are updates to the site going in even as I type? 🙂

That last comment did not dump me onto the 'My Account' page but redisplayed here (as it should 🙂 ).

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 11:18It is presumably** a fairly simple matter to run a one-time scan of the comments database and fix up all the old comments with suitable 'related discussions' links?

[ ** But then we all know where ASSuMEing gets one don't we! 🙂 ]

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 07/08/2017 - 11:33Yes our website developers have been following this thread and are doing what they can in real time