Welcome to the all new Tamebay!
The old Tamebay may not have been broken but it was high time for an overhaul and today our new site is finally here.
For months, we’ve been working behind the scenes, and often late at night, on plans to make sure that Tamebay goes from strength to strength in the years to come. Step one was making sure we had the right hosting and ample bandwidth for the dramatic growth in traffic we’ve seen in the past few years. That was sorted a few months back.
Step two was a new site. Tamebay started as a labour of love and we never want to lose that enthusiasm. Nowadays Tamebay has tens of thousands of readers a week, we needed to make sure the site can take the load. Our last design has served us all well for four years, (does anyone still remember our original design?) but it’s time for another change and one that will work for a few years into the future and this is the result.
It’s been a new experience for us at Tamebay. In the past, Sue sorted out Tamebay’s look and feel and did a grand job. She also sorted all the techie stuff and the servers and the like but she isn’t currently available to guide us, so we have had to learn a lot in the absence of her expertise.
And we’ve had some sterling help. We’ve been working with a great bunch of guys at wearejh.com based in Nottingham. They’ve worked really hard to get this new site happening and we’re thrilled with their work. They’re young and brimming with clever ideas.
Needless to say, we’d love to hear your views and we know you won’t be shy. It’ll probably take you a while to become accustomed to the new look and feel of Tamebay so if you can’t find what you’re looking for please ask.
Tamebay needs to reflect the changing field of ecommerce and better serve an expanding readership as much interested in Facebook as Feedback. One of the problems of the old design was that stories you were commenting on rapidly disappeared from the home page, sometimes within a matter of hours. Now we’ll not only be able to present content in logical sections on Tamebay’s home page, but we’ll be able to keep the news you’re most interested in on the home page for longer.
We still have some parts of the site to work on, there are a few pages that need re-working and there are bound to be a few creases that need a quick run with the iron to get the wrinkles out. If you spot anything amiss or if something looks weird in the browser you’re using please let us know and we’ll try and sort it out sharpish.
Many thanks to everyone who made our new site possible, the techie guys at wearejh.com and vidahost.com, our advertisers without whom the site wouldn’t be possible, everyone who gave advice and input on the new design and of course to you our readers for supporting us over the past six years.
It’s rather like Doctor Who. We mention this because Sue wouldn’t forgive us if we didn’t. Everything must regenerate. Welcome to Tamebay Mark III.
Chris Dawson & Dan Wilson
49 Responses
Very nice, clean and bright.
I’m liking it.
Chris & Dan,
Congratulations! Looking forward to the new and improved TameBay (but with all the good stuff that has always been there left in for good measure).
Very excited to see the new look and feel. Taking it all in of course but at first glance, the first thing I think of is “clean and streamlined.” Superb.
Cheers!
RBH
(I am an eBay employee based in the US).
Ok, wrinkle number one. Comments seem to be repeating themselves (no change there then some of you may think).
It’s on the snag list.
Hey Tamebay!
Loving the new look! Nice job!
.
Clean & Contemporary, like it…!
Loving the new look guys, really clean and refreshing to the eyes 🙂
Congratulations!
Lace
It looks nice but it appears you’ve dropped the chronological ordering of articles. If I want to see if you have a new article I now have to look at every single category and see if you’ve posted something new. There needs to be a way to see articles in the order they’ve been written without going through that process.
There seems to be a problem where it doesn’t automatically pre-fill the fields for commenting like the previous version did.
When commenting it is no longer using the javascript lightbox to edit. Instead it goes to a separate page. Something is obviously wrong there. You might want to check to make sure you’ve included all the proper javascript files or that it is compatible with whatever version of jQuery you are now using.
This is a comment that is (when first written) invisible to general users.
When you temporarily block someone for possible spam there is no indication to the user that their comment is awaiting moderation. Perhaps this is intentional to throw off the possible spammer but is not the way TameBay operated before. I do know you guys briefly experimented with doing that a few years ago but stopped.
Morning Chris, Dan,
Much cleaner!
One quick suggestion:
The images on the homepage articles, they need to be linked to the article.
I’m sure I’m not the only person that has clicked on an image that doesn’t go anywhere 🙂
Matt
Love the new look much cleaner and brighter in fact!
My only bad comment is I can’t easily see what is NEW stories to the site, before you knew what was new and what to read first? perhaps it is just because it has changed and it will take a little getting used to?
Well done Chris & Dan!
The redesign looks really fresh and clean – well done!
I would echo earlier comments, regarding it being difficult to easily identify new articles.
Could each articles posting date being shown on the homepage?
Also, to save bandwith you could use gzip compression. I reduced my sites bandwith needs from 100gb a month to around 35gb a month by doing this.
Wohoo – I like the new look! Very refreshing. Well done Chris & Dan.
Looking superb, Chris!
I know this has been in the workings for quite sometime and as with any big site changes there is a real sense of excitement yet apprehension for how its going to be received. I think it looks brilliant, its cleaner, nicely spaced out and the larger font size makes it easier to read at a glance.
Well done!
Lookin’ good. Time to bust out the virtual champagne?
The old design saved my details for posting, I love it, it’s clean, fresh & new.
Things I miss?
That tiny smiley face on the bottom left hand side, yes one of those little things but then that was a Sue thing I suppose, I’m sure she’d love it too 😉
Also … where’s the forum gone? That could be such a bonus to Tamebay and to it’s traffic.
If you have a screen grab of the old site on the bottom left hand of every page by the footer there was a 🙂 as in a ‘:’ and a ‘)’ It was a Sue thing. 😉
Dear Tamebay,
Quiet frankly, the new web-site looks absolutely awesome – it’s cleaner, it’s faster, it’s refreshing to eyes and most importantly – it’s new! 🙂
Linn Systems wish you guys all the best,
it’s been great pleasure working with you and we are looking forward to the new and improved TameBay.
Great job!
Best,
The Linn Systems Team
Re viewing the most recent content and posts in chronological order, obviously Chris has highlighted some of the options but I think we have a bit of work to do there (by popular demand).
We’ll put our thinking caps on.
Dan
Looks great, i’m lost though!!!! 🙂
It’s looking great! 🙂 I thought it was broken the other day, relieved to see it’s just a revamp.
Loving the new site. Clean, crisp, simple and easy to navigate. Looking forward to more great blog posts to follow over the next few years.
Love the new look and feel, the site loads so much quicker. Sharp and Cool, congrats.
Could you add links at the top of the page to each category to save scrolling down the page?
Other than that, very nice!
Looks great Chris-I can see you guys have put a lot of thought into this redesign. Love the clean lines and white space!
For everyone that wanted news in chronological order we’ve built a new “All News (By Date)” topic into the menu structure under the “Home” drop down.
All suggestions and comments welcome, let us know how you’re getting used to the new site and of course if you find any bugs remaining that we need to iron out.
Cris this site is so different from the old. Quite a shock to see how different, but so far seems to have everything we need.
So Congratulations to all (and Sue would have been impressed to!)
David
Chris & co,
Loving the new site, well done on all the hard work and design – looks really good.
Hope you are well,
Michele
I like the new site, fresh and clean, easy to read especially since you’ve added “All News (By Date)” option. I’ve the attention span of a gnat so searching for stuff would have been a no no.
Great.
Maybe the “All News (By Date)” option should be the default setting. I did not realise this feature was present until katakitty posted their message.
Nice and clean. Would have been better if the feature image are smaller giving opportunity for the text on the right to be more visible unless you would like to have visual impact like facebook/Google + !