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

Badger

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

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 11:18One way out of the what to display on the floating panel dilemma is to offer both and let the viewer choose.

List both 'Popular Discussions' and 'Related Articles' as header titles on the top of the floating panel.

The main title text (in each case) would click through to another page (as now) but the '>' symbol would be separately clickable and cause either a list of popular discussions or a list of related articles to be displayed on the floating panel below the two titles (with suitable visual cues - i.e. the '>' becomes a 'V' to indicate which list is being displayed and the relevant title is re-ordered (as necessary) to list closest to the currently displayed list as just the arrow changing from '>' to 'V' is easy to miss).

Badger

11:48 AM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 11:43bravo to the developers.

Just that one simple change has improved my own Property118 web site user experience enormously.

Well done chaps / chappesses! 🙂

Kathy Evans

11:49 AM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 11:12I see it in both FF and Opera on Win 7 and Win 8.1 (and XP, but let's not mention that!)

Kathy Evans

11:53 AM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Neil Patterson at 07/08/2017 - 11:18Clearing cache makes no difference

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

11:57 AM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 07/08/2017 - 11:44Badger, your ideas for the floating right panel are genius. Thank you sooooo much for that. Now to find out what it would cost us to have that 🙁

Badger

11:57 AM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 06/08/2017 - 20:54just a quick update to this - a popup for entering comments (as opposed to logging on), whilst being a distinct improvement over the current situation of being scrolled to the end of the page is perhaps slightly less optimal than opening up a text entry box 'in place' there and then on the page and already visually located so as to indicate which message is being commented to.

This would be the ultimate nirvana solution.

Popups tend to obscure the underlying text that one is trying to comment on and can often not easily be moved aside sufficiently to reveal said underlying text either.

Badger

12:08 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Mark Alexander at 07/08/2017 - 11:18If my earlier suggestion to 'dual-purpose' the floating panel is not liked or perhaps will cost too much to implement then I would suggest that it is better to have the panel used to track related articles rather than popular discussions as this better maintains the user's context.

A web site visitor may very well be interested in the popular discussions list of course but I suggest that this is something they select in a different context to the 'current message' whereas they may very well want to dive off and checked a related item as their interest is piqued during the course of reading a given thread.

If a choice had to be made then to me 'Popular Discussions' is just something that feels slightly more at home (fixed) at the top of the page rather than as now.

Badger

12:13 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

'Forums' button on the home page:

There should be a 'Forums' button on the page banner along with the current 'Login', 'Members Directory', and 'Search for an Article' buttons.

This button should appear everywhere that the other listed buttons do (so that it's sudden absence on some pages doesn't confuse).

Badger

12:24 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Reply to the comment left by Badger at 07/08/2017 - 12:13If screen real estate is the problem (on smart phones and the like for example) then I would suggest that having a 'Forums' button on the main banner is more important than 'Members Directory'.

The loss of this button could be somewhat compensated for by offering it as an option when hovering over user avatars.

And of course it would still be made available under the 'View All Sections' page.

On the subject of the 'View All Sections' link - if you click on this you get the expected page but unfortunately the page is displayed in such a way as to render the browser back button devoid of history so it is not possible to click it to get back to where one came from. Depending upon what one is doing at the time this is merely mildly irritating all the way through to very annoying.

Mark Alexander - Founder of Property118

12:30 PM, 7th August 2017, About 7 years ago

Badger,
Thank you again for your observations.

In regards to the "View All Sections" button, this is the ONLY navigation on our mobile devices design. The "back" function is irrelevant to both mobile and desktop because "View All Sections" is actually not a page, it is a modal which fills the users screen. Therefore, closing the modal returns a user to the page they were previously looking at.

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