Simplification

Over the last few years, I think RateItAll has gotten a bit too complicated. We've been piling on features, and developing our own terminology for things that nobody outside the world of RIA understands.

We have three channels - RIA, Weblists, and Local all of which consist of basically the same thing.... ratings lists. We have so many things jammed into the home page that I'm not really sure newbies have any idea what the heck the site is about. There are six calls to action packed into the yellow header on the home page - this message needs to be simplified into something that is easy to understand.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to work on simplifying the site. I plan on collapsing the three channels of the site into one and placing the emphasis of the site on the related activities of finding a list / publish a list. I'm going to make it so it doesn't take three clicks to start publishing a Weblist. I'm also going to invest heavily in the weblist publishing tool - with the availability of things like Ajax, there's no reason that we should have to reload a page to add a new item to a list.

The goal is going be across the board simplification - you may even see the disappearance of a few bandwidth intensive features that people aren't using much.

As these changes progress, I'll be asking from feedback from some top RIA members. If you'd like to be included in this feedback loop, please feel free to message me.