New Site Improvements and Roadmap

[MidnightMountain]

At first glance it seems EECIE is a fantastic site and community. Most sites in any industry never achieve this. Congratulations!

Ironically, the site features seem relatively outdated and clunky, leading me to these questions:
1) Are site features and modernization currently being actively worked on?
2) Is so is there a road map of what’s planned or a change log of hats recently been improved?
3) If not what do you need to start (1)? Do you need technical help? Software development help? Cloud or server resources?

Whatever is needed are you open to offers of help to get stuff done? I don’t even want any payment, I (maybe others as well) might be willing to help out a bit for free, just to make my own site experience better, faster, and more efficient, especially for the most common things people come here to do on the site.

Btw, getting this kind of help does not require disclosing private information of any kind. It’s common to test improvements with dummy data, this is what health care provider sites do, the tech people who build stuff never see any private information.

Best regards,
MM

[normalguy21]

If it Aint Broke dont fix it !

You sound like a nice guy but for some reason while reading this post i had a flashback to 2014 when there was a request in a software developers forum on a web site with someone taking bids on having a exact clone of another web site in the hobby .

The ticket was filled for a little over 2k $

They specified in the job order a EXACT WORKING CLONE with all attributes .

Have no idea why the thought to recall this popped in my head ?

In my arrogant opion and along with my mis speled words people like what they know and what has worked .

another site used to naughty and also had reviews then they rolled out a whole new format they where even based in silicon valley .

It sucked so bad after the new roll out traffic dropped off and in the shitter it went .

I like the current way things are but change is always going to happen do to man and women evolving .

But i will also add that as i type this and act so informed i know nothing and the above typed words prove my last statement ...

[MidnightMountain]

Hey Slick, good to meet you (for some reason ur name flashed me back to the movie Heat with Robert DeNiro, slick was on a heist crew).

You bring up some great points. It has to be done very carefully. Many companies have tried to make “improvements” to a site, only to have it become a nightmare that customers actually liked much less! The thing is though, anything can be done poorly. I’m sure you’ve seen a restaurant you loved make menu changes, or open a new location, that ended up sucking.

So what’s the trick that lets some successful sites to continuously improve without creating a cluster of pissed off customers?

There are a lot of best practices, but a few of the biggest tricks are:

- Don’t guess. Ask users what they care about. Focus on common scenarios not obscure requests.

- Even if you think you’ve listened, *never* just roll out a surprise new version of a site. Start by keeping the existing site unchanged, and letting small groups of experienced users trial private beta changes to get their opinion. If you ask 10 people and they all love it, open the beta to 25 people. If the first 10 hate it, you have to try again, but at least you haven’t driven people away or hurt the business.

- Don’t let site owners or technical people make all the user interface decisions. Owner and staff input is important, but as you are listening to what people want, also include at least one person with UX experience, who knows the process of interpreting user feedback into good design changes, that are practical and work well. This part is not all art. Yes some of it is having good design intuition, but a UX (user experience) person also uses well established processes that make it more efficient to get the right result.

Again you are correct that things work as is, and the site already has a lot of success. The other side of the coin is no business can afford to be complacent. It doesn’t take many years passing to go stale on the Internet. The hardest part, building a great community, has already been achieved. I see no reason to risk that or not nurture it as a precious asset.

[ElectricHorseman]

It sure would be nice to have a favorites feature. Perhaps there already is but I can't find it. I travel a lot and look in many different locales. If I could favorite my picks it would reduce shopping considerably. Thanks

[papadee]

Originally Posted by ElectricHorseman

It sure would be nice to have a favorites feature. Perhaps there already is but I can't find it. I travel a lot and look in many different locales. If I could favorite my picks it would reduce shopping considerably. Thanks

Here they're called "contacts", not favorites. Look on your favorite provider's public profile, not showcase. Under her name, there's a tab called users lists. Click on it & then click "add to contacts". You can then view your contacts from your user control panel.

[dreamvacationdates]

Originally Posted by MidnightMountain

At first glance it seems EECIE is a fantastic site and community. Most sites in any industry never achieve this. Congratulations!

Ironically, the site features seem relatively outdated and clunky, leading me to these questions:
1) Are site features and modernization currently being actively worked on?
2) Is so is there a road map of what’s planned or a change log of hats recently been improved?
3) If not what do you need to start (1)? Do you need technical help? Software development help? Cloud or server resources?

Whatever is needed are you open to offers of help to get stuff done? I don’t even want any payment, I (maybe others as well) might be willing to help out a bit for free, just to make my own site experience better, faster, and more efficient, especially for the most common things people come here to do on the site.

Btw, getting this kind of help does not require disclosing private information of any kind. It’s common to test improvements with dummy data, this is what health care provider sites do, the tech people who build stuff never see any private information.

Best regards,
MM

First you got to realized that this site is a off the shelf Vbulletin site, so most likely it's going to use features that's you can get from there or those sources that make plugins and mods for Vbulletin. so they are most likely the most stable plugins, mods they have, but most likely not using everything they provide as mods and plugins, also people that do a lot of development for this type of site do it under open source, you'll be better going to the Vbulletin site and see what they have and how to integrate with what they supply.