15 Years old... why not celebrate by...

[dern]

...getting some talented web designers to sort out your website? I've been a member of this site for ages and it's never been cutting edge in terms of design or functionality which I guess was part of the charm. However it's starting to look like you've let every young member of the families of the people who run this site each have a turn sticking a feature in.

The new home page is a start but you click on the links and the stories look completely different to the home page. You then click on comments or the forums and it's still exactly the same as it was years and years ago and it doesn't work very well on mobile devices. The whole mobile experience is dire. It's a real dog's breakfast.

Please do this site some justice and get some people in who know what they're doing, who can give the site a common look and feel all the way through, stop it looking like some anachronism from the 90s and please please hire someone who can make it work properly on a mobile device.

Thanks,

Mark

[Fluid]

Got to agree, the mobile site is awful.

[otolith]

If you do modernise it, don't stick a ton of unnecessary modern AJAX toss into it.

[rscott]

dern said:

...getting some talented web designers to sort out your website? I've been a member of this site for ages and it's never been cutting edge in terms of design or functionality which I guess was part of the charm. However it's starting to look like you've let every young member of the families of the people who run this site each have a turn sticking a feature in.

The new home page is a start but you click on the links and the stories look completely different to the home page. You then click on comments or the forums and it's still exactly the same as it was years and years ago and it doesn't work very well on mobile devices. The whole mobile experience is dire. It's a real dog's breakfast.

Please do this site some justice and get some people in who know what they're doing, who can give the site a common look and feel all the way through, stop it looking like some anachronism from the 90s and please please hire someone who can make it work properly on a mobile device.

Thanks,

Mark

Have you tried the mobile beta skin? It's a big improvement. Doesn't work perfectly but they've said a new version is due in October (http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=24&t=1434521&mid=124794&nmt=Mobile+beta+-+Missing+posts )

[anonymous-user]

"Request desktop site", every time.

The mobile site, Beta or not, is a major put-off. Navigation is clunky, it looks like it was thrown together by my neighbour's 3 year old, and it's nigh-on impossible to search for "just" videos or "just" specific news items. It's an awful interface.

Desktop site and zoom, even on a phone.

[RacingPete]

dern said:

...getting some talented web designers to sort out your website? I've been a member of this site for ages and it's never been cutting edge in terms of design or functionality which I guess was part of the charm. However it's starting to look like you've let every young member of the families of the people who run this site each have a turn sticking a feature in.

The new home page is a start but you click on the links and the stories look completely different to the home page. You then click on comments or the forums and it's still exactly the same as it was years and years ago and it doesn't work very well on mobile devices. The whole mobile experience is dire. It's a real dog's breakfast.

Please do this site some justice and get some people in who know what they're doing, who can give the site a common look and feel all the way through, stop it looking like some anachronism from the 90s and please please hire someone who can make it work properly on a mobile device.

Thanks,

Mark

As another member of the site and also as someone who doesn't know what they are doing for the last 8 years working on and off on the site I share your sentiments... but with a few exceptions.

We do have talented designers working on the site, and talented developers building it - like it or loathe it the changes to the homepage and classifieds have been in an effort to move the design on for the site so it doesn't look like it is still from the early 00s. The average amount of developers working on the site over those last 8 years is about 2.5, and only recently have we had the funding to extend that to more than 4 developers, thus we are now bringing in the changes.

Also, priorities have been aligned with where money lies in the site (for hopefully obvious reasons), and thus the focus has been on classifieds and dealer support.

But, we are now working across the whole of the site to make it consistent and over the remaining parts of this year we are doing the following:

• New Homepage
• New Forum Search
• Mobile Design across whole site including major updates to...
• - Homepage
• - News
• - Forums

among some other tweaks....

... though always happy to hear feedback however you fancy articulating it

[23rdian]

I have to say the mobile site (the forum at least) is one of the better ones. At least on Android phone it is.

I really don't get the hate for the design on here. It seems quite lightweight compared to some others.

[dern]

Pete, it wasn't intended as a slight on you or any of the other developers and I'm aware that pressure to work in a certain way can come from external forces and determined as much by time and money than by talent. However, which ever way you wrap it up the site looks a right mess. It's rectifiable by talented developers and if they're already in the team then my request is to the people who run the site to give people like you the opportunity to improve it.

[0a]

The forum is by far the easiest and most convenient forum I have used - excellent, there's no particular need to change. Usability, the content and the posters matter, not web design fashions,

[dern]

graphene said:

0a said:

The forum is by far the easiest and most convenient forum I have used - excellent, there's no particular need to change. Usability, the content and the posters matter, not web design fashions,

I agree, the forum is light, clear and functional (especially if you increase the posts-per-page/page-length in the preferences).

The 'Return to topic' screen you see after posting a reply appears to be unnecessary (think this has been on the dev list before now) Perhaps, some better wysiwyg to encourage a more widespread use of the formatting options.

I kind of agree on the look and feel of it but it's ste on a mobile device, doesn't support tapatalk and the search is utterly garbage. You could achieve the same feel with the download forum packages and have it looking nice and functionally it would be considerably improved. This was written 10 years ago... things (usually) move on.

[CC07 PEU]

The forum works perfectly on a mobile device. The home page and in particular, the classifieds, do not work well on a mobile device. So hopefully the forums will remain unchanged.

[otolith]

If you implement Tapatalk or anything similar, please make sure the "never bother me with this pointless junk again" button works. Got a browser, thanks, don't wnt nagging to install pointless software.