New Deals site. Please take a look.

Thanks guys.

I've just noticed that our voucher and freebies sections are not currently working. This is an encoding issue and I'm looking to fix it this weekend (it is caused by content having special characters) so please ignore that.

However I am interested to know if people failed to notice that we have 3 sections on the site? Do the headings need to be more prominent?

I'm currently working on SEO optimisation at the moment.

I've been advised that the kind of site we have is not very good for SEO because it doesn't tend to produce original content and I have a strategy planned to help with this.

However our biggest problem I feel will be in helping to nurture a vibrant community. I'm going to try and get involved with the deals community here to try and get better content for the site and hopefully some people from here will one day find our site and get use out of it. I'm also hoping to observe what features people may want so I can make our site better.

I'd really appreciate any advice people on here might have regarding building such a community from scratch. Sort of drawing a blank at the moment. Do we build it through facebook/twitter or do we try and spread the work through existing communities like the one of here? Expecting it to occur organically hasn't really worked and likely won't work given the SEO problems we face.

Any input is more than welcome. Cheers.

Thanks,

Cookie notification is on the to do list and I'll hopefully get to it in the next couple of weeks. There is a privacy policy in the footer links.

I'm looking into a new active colour to have with the teal to make the page look a bit more vibrant so when I implement that I will review those links at the bottom.

Well there is a system in place to gather the images automatically from the linked sources but it hadn't been working on most sites until last night when I discovered that my useragent was been blocked. Working on a fix now that seems to automatically return images in 80+ percent of cases, and these are selected on the basis of size and proportion (and I'll be working on this selection algorithm continuously) so hopefully that will ease the burden on myself and others who are currently contributing content.

I'm inclined not to put restrictions on image size simply because I want the process to be as easy as possible, but I do plan on having a system for notifying admin when a small image is used so that they can perhaps find a higher res version if necessary.

Thanks for the feedback. It is still beta and it's all about prioritizing the work to be done (I have a very long to-do list) because free-time is in short supply with a 5 week old baby in the house!!

Great Feedback thanks.

I'll look into a doing a "return to top" button. Not particularly difficult really and it would be useful.

Filtering is in the original brief but I'm not really convinced it's actually needed until we get more content going up regularly. But yes there will be categories and the code base already supports it. We're in phase 2 of development, which is about ironing out bugs and tweaking design (the header got a total overhaul a couple weeks back). Once we get out of beta and I get the CMS up and running properly I'll add categories.

Just checked out the DoneDeal favicon, hadn't realized how similar they are. Still working on a logo so it'll do until then.

Not sure about getting rid of the FB icon on products. I'd need to get more feedback on how annoying it is before I removed it but you've put it on my radar.

I love my LOAD MORE button. I wanted to make sure it couldn't be missed :P I think I got the idea from the adult swim website.

Mostly euro symbols just shouldn't be displaying at all (there is a character set mis-match on the server), they should not be getting swapped for £ symbols. It's possible users are linking to deals from british sites and entering the pound price in the "price" input, which is displayed as being euro. I'll look into the problem and may have to build a switch the user can use to swap between euro and sterling prices.

Thanks for the heads up

Noted. Thanks for your feedback. I'll make this a high priority update.

Dubwat wrote: »

When I hover over an image, a 'f' graphic comes up. It's centrally placed and easily clicked by accident as most people would click the centre of a photo for more info. Clicking it, a new tab opens without my permission and tries to open a connection to facebook. That would be a big no-no for me.

Avoiding the FB redirect, and clicking on an offer, it seems to take you to the sellers homepage, e.g. Argos. So it would appear content is submitted by users and you're re-directed to the ad on the companies site. Maybe I've got it wrong? How are you different to, say, Bargain Alerts on here?

There doesn't appear to be any filter. (Very) roughly speaking, 30% of the homepage is gardening stuff and 30% is women's clothing. How do I filter out the women's clothing?

Good luck with your venture but I'd strongly suggest you rethink your FB redirects...

I'll raise the issue of the facebook icon with my partner in the project. Appreciate the feedback on this.

Regards the clicking on an offer and being directed to the sellers website, it should link you to an onsite page with more information where there is a large button that then links to the sellers page. Content is submitted by users in the form of a link to the sellers page, a title and description of the product/sale. We are not like Groupon or living social, we do not provide the offers ourselves.

It's not at all different to the Bargain Alerts forum. I have even taken deals from that forum to posted them on the site. It is just a custom built tool for this activity, rather than a tool which happens to facilitate it. Filtering will be added in an upcoming update along with many other features. Currently a low priority but I'll review that status.

Thanks for the feedback guys. We've decided that the facebook button being in the centre of the image is a problem and I'm working on a solution.