It’s been three months since we launched the new site design for Tamebay, although it feels like a lot longer – I can hardly remember what the old site looked like now.
We’re still working on a few ideas and tweaks to the site some of which will be visible and others which hopefully will enhance your use of Tamebay but that you may not even notice…. Although when I say “We’re still working”, what I actually mean is that our fantastic dev team at We Are JH are doing all the actual work!
Most talked about on Tamebay
Today one of the new features has gone live. In the right hand side bar of the home page you’ll find a new design for the “Most Talked About” stories on Tamebay. It will display the articles that have had the most comments over the past 30 days and the intention is to make it easy for you to find topics which you may still want to comment on, but aren’t necessarily still featured with an image on the home page.
Next to the title of the article you’ll also find the number of comments that the story attracted in brackets.
Following comments on Tamebay
Another feature we put live since the site launch is the ability to receive an email when someone replies to your comments on Tamebay. Beneath the comments box is a check box which if you tick will notify you of follow-up comments via the email address you enter when commenting.
Things we find interesting
We’ve added a completely new section at the bottom of the right hand side bar of the home page. This is where we’ll share things we read on the net that we find interesting, but aren’t necessarily things that we’ll blog about.
Dan and I read a wide range of articles on all sorts of topics so sometimes you might find something loosely related to Ecommerce, at other times it could be something totally off the wall that one or other of us just find interesting.
Minor Fixes
We’ve put a few minor fixes in place in recently, such as some of the Archives Page links weren’t working correctly (they are now).
Please do let us know if you see something not quite working as it should do and we’ll do our best to get it fixed. Also if you have any great ideas for other tweaks we could add to Tamebay we’re always interested to hear. Even if your ideas are not technically feasible or within our current development budget we may be able to consider them for next year.
16 Responses
When tamebay annouced that it was having a re-vamp i was a little reserved about what was to come but the new fresh look is appealing to me and definitely would not want you guys to go back to the old format.
The ‘most talked about’ links are a great idea it certainly saves some scrolling 🙂
Whilst overall I like many of the changes and the ‘fresh’ approach I do not like the mixing of adverts in the main information sections at all which I find intrusive to my enjoyment of the site overall and very distracting.
Whilst the ‘white space’ looks nice there is far too much of it and it requires unnecessary scrolling down to check on new updates.
pip pip
I also wondered about the effects of the revamp before it happened. Obviously we had all become very fond of the previous layout. But I for one am very happy with the new layout with just one or two possible exceptions.
The White space between postings is just a shade too large. It would certainly help if it could be reduced by perhaps a third.
Other White Space could also be reduced. Is it perhaps possible to run an item with differant percentages of White Space. So that one posting and its comments the White Space was reduced by say 10% another the White Space by say 25% another with a reduction of perhaps 33% etc and let us all comment on which looks best?
As far as the adverts mentioned by Cambridge_BLue I think that as this is the means by which the site is funded that we just have to get to like them. As in so much these days there are adverts and after a while we just accept that they are there. I must admit that I barely notice them.
Certainly if I was asked I would tend to give the new site layout a score in the middle to high 90’s out of a 100.
I would love to see a more mobile freindly site. I have problems with the drop down menus when browsing on my android phone.
Well we are all entitled to our opinions but I remain of the view that there is simply to much ‘white space’ and it detracts from my use and enjoyment of this site which I greatly value.
Of much more importance and irritation however is the ‘spattering’ of all these paid for ads amongst screen space that should be reserved for editorial content.
They both clutter the main content of the site, degrade the usability and are simply bad practice and greatly annoy many users.
Content goes in one place and ads are placed in suitable ‘reservations’ on the screen and there should be no possibility of mixing them up – period.
If you want to see a good example of how to do this check out the channel site of the register which can be found here:
https://www.channelregister.co.uk/
Take that as an example and find a way to work more ads into it where you don’t mix them up (too much) with the real content of the site.
pip pip