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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Comments

Whiteskifreak Surrey

11:52 AM, 3rd August 2017, About 7 years ago

Agree.
I have approx 50% of white page and a rather narrow strip with comments almost in the middle.
Have not tried the page on smartphone yet.
NB I just tried to post this comment and got a message:
"You are posting comments too quickly -slow down"
What exactly is meant by that?

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

12:12 PM, 3rd August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Whiteskifreak Surrey at 03/08/2017 - 11:50Yes, we agree with that too.

Whilst the current version looks awesome on mobile there is far too much white-space when viewing from desktops and laptops.

The "Popular Discussions" panel to the right, which we had on the previous layout, was good because users could see at a glance what other members are discussing.

Kathy Evans

18:34 PM, 3rd August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Neil Patterson at <a href="02/08/2017" rel="nofollow">https://www.property118.com/please-give-us-feedback-new-website-design/comment-page-5/#comment-93213">02/08/2017 - 16:48In Opera it is very nice compact layout with black text on a white background with a text area that's only a couple of inches high and normal size text - unlike the awful massive white text on a blue background that covers the entire screen in FF.

Kathy Evans

18:38 PM, 3rd August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 02/08/2017 - 18:58I use FF for most things but several things look awful in it. Opera is faster and has more settings than Chrome (which is a very nasty browser). I'm actually switching to Vivaldi for most things as FF is getting rid of many plugins and extensions.

Mandy Thomson

11:44 AM, 4th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Great fresh new look - more contemporary and easier font to read. I've just tried it on my iPhone 6 and it's clear and behaves well on there too. Just one suggestion; you might want to add a jump to comments link or a down arrow to the post as the larger fonts means comments are harder to spot.

Badger

19:57 PM, 6th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Kozie Ltd at 27/07/2017 - 22:12I agree - the old Property118 site had a certain uniqueness about it whereas the new one just looks like any other blog.

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

20:07 PM, 6th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 06/08/2017 - 19:57Thank you for your feedback Badger.

We have taken on board and acted on the majority of the constructive critique we have received. If you could be more specific in regards to what you feel the old website had, which the new one is lacking, that could prove to be extremely helpful.

Badger

20:09 PM, 6th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 28/07/2017 - 08:22Please god not an App.

Stick with the web site.

Badger

20:21 PM, 6th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 06/08/2017 - 20:07That's a bit more tricky (but see my next comment coming shortly).

It's more just a general feel - the new site is just harder to use.

I'm not a Luddite that just hates all things new for the sake of it and I do have some experience of these things as well.

I will try to keep kicking in new thoughts as and when they come up / occur to me.

Badger

20:29 PM, 6th August 2017, About 7 years ago

I'm afraid that I far prefer the old site. I agree with Kozie Ltd.

With regard to the specifics:

Please spell out the date and time that a message was posted - not dumb it down to 'a week ago', or the even worse 'a year ago'. This style of timestamping becomes progressively less helpful the further out in time we go and makes it extremely difficult to understand the sequence of messages posted - especially across threads. (What is it with this style spreading like a rash all over the internet these day? Rhetorical question. As an ex-owner of a web site development and programming firm myself this is the kind of thing that I am wont to refer to as 'technical masturbation' - done just because it can be / because it massages the programmer's ego rather than serves the customer best.)

Please do not vector me to the 'My Account' page after every comment that I add to the discussion. (This was a problem with the old site as well.)

When I do get vectored to my 'My Account' page I am presented with a list of posts from other people.

Do not scroll me to the bottom of the page to add a comment / reply to the thread. I am reading comments inline and wish to retain my context. it's damned annoying to have to navigate back to where I was. The most precious commodity that we all have is time. Do not needlessly squander your readers time by making them skip to and from pages and scroll unnecessarily.

Your model for comment and thread handling should be Disqus as used by the likes of the Guardian and others.

Can you *PLEASE* organise things so that pages can be printed without suffering from massive text overlaying problems. This was also a problem on the old site.

'Reply' link doesn't work unless you are logged in but no explanation for this frustrating absence of action on the part of the web page is offered. You should popup a 'login' dialogue and then seamlessly return the user to where they were - none of this dumping them into their 'My Account' page (because for sure that is most certainly NOT where they want to go in that moment!)

'Report Comment' link doesn't work (I wasn't really trying to report a comment - just report that the 'Reply' link didn't work for that message!)

Please god not an App. Stick with the web site. (Again, just because it can be done doesn't mean it should be done - see 'Technical masturbation' above.) I hate service specific apps and there is always the worry that scarce and expensive programming effort will be diluted to the typical detriment of one or both platforms - apps & website - going forward.

The *ONE* thing I do like about Facebook is the way that avatars are expanded when you hover over them. It would be good to be able to see a larger picture of the various Property118 contributors (says he that doesn't even have an avatar! 🙂 )

I run Win 7 & Firefox (both with the latest patches) and my comments reflect what I see on this platform.

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