Flooding the System with Votes (Continued)

It's fun when a site tweak works as hoped.

Check out this graph of total review votes posted on RateItAll. Can anyone spot the day that we rolled in the voting changes? We'll see if the increased volume holds, but for now, it would appear that this enhancement is exceeding our expectations.

Congrats to RateItAll's design and engineering teams for a job well done.

A New Logo!

Guys, check it out....

RateItAll is the proud owner of a sleek new logo.

It reminds me of fireworks! Or a sleek rocket ship! Or shooting golden stars through the night sky!

OK, maybe I'm getting carried away... but I REALLY like the logo.

Our old logo was originally designed to be very "business-y" - this one seems a lot friendlier to me.

If you have kind words to say, please send them to Lena.

If you have harsh words to say, please send them to Jose.

And if you want to rate the logo, click HERE.

Couple of Minor Display Changes

Guys, a couple of minor display changes were made to the site today:

• We are now showing the top 70 items on any list page before making you page. This will only affect long lists, like this list for Horror Movie Reviews, for example.
• Similarly, we are now displaying up to 70 reviews on any item page. Here's an example.
• We are hiding reviews of fewer than 10 characters from appearing on the item page. They will still show up in the recent comments page, or on a reviewer's archive page, but not on the item page. The way we see it, if someone just writes "sucks!" (five characters), they probably just meant to leave a rating anyway.

Have a great and safe Fourth of July weekend....

"New Stuff" page

Guys, we've made some changes to the New Stuff page - the page that tracks new things that have just been added to the site.

We've simplified the hierarchy of links shown for each new list or item, and also give clearer credit to the person who added it.

Couple of Fixes Went Live Today

• We added the HOF link
• We darkened the link color a little more (yes, I know I said I wasn't going any darker)
• We've added "add description" and "add image" links to Rate-O-Matic / SpeedRate. So if you're speed rating, and an item doesn't have a description or a photo, you can add one. This sort of editing is really helpful for your fellow Weblisters (and RIA)
• We've added the Yahoo! shopping ads to the right side of the Speed Rate pages. This is one of those instances where I think ads actually make the experience better, because of the photos. For example, I was speed rating an actor list today, and it was helpful to see photos for the folks I couldn't identify from their names.
• We fixed a bug so that the text is now showing up besides list and item page images, as opposed to below
• We blended the AdSense ads into the site better (this actually happened two days ago)
• We fixed an annoying bug where none of our Drama Movies were showing up in the search results. Now they are.

Thanks to Jan and Peter for their hard work in getting these fixes out today. Next week we're making some fixes to our FB app and hopefully, rolling out a Bebo app.

* Oh Yeah, one more: It is again possible to post YouTube videos, and other Flash widgets, in reviews (as long as you're posting from the item page."

Couple O' Tweaks

We made a couple of small tweaks last night:

- Based on repeated pestering from Genghis The Hun and others, we've darkened the orange link font a bit more. This is as dark as we're going to go dammit, so don't bug me anymore :)

- We've added a new RIA for Facebook icon in the top right corner of every page. Thanks Dan.

- We've added a bit more padding to the text column on the information pages like this one, to make them a bit easier to read

- We've added item descriptions to the right column of the SpeedRate /Rate-o-Matic pages to make it easier to identify the item that is being rated

Darker Font, TIghter Design - So Fresh and So Clean

Based on your feedback, we darkened the font, fixed some typos, and generally tightened up the design. I'm pretty happy with it.

Tighten Up - Tweaking the New Design

Guys,

Here's our tweak list for today. If you see anything else on the site that needs to be fixed and isn't already on the list, please post it in the comments:

Most Urgent

• Fix the search box - it's not working on any page except for the home page (FIXED)
• We're going to make the orange links a bit darker site wide (the designer will provide us with the RGB code for the style sheet)
• Caching on Browse Tags isn't working. The page consistently times out. Let's just hardcode this page as for now
  

Home Page

• We need to align the right side of the testimonial exactly with the right side of the gray nav bar.
• Home Page Typo: News and Tips: should be "Adding Background Images to Display Widgets" (we're missing the "g")

Sub-Home Pages

• get rid of "trusted recommendations box (and text)" on sub-home pages
• left align category names (e.g. Computers and Internet) with subject names (e.g. Web Site Directory) (do this for the whole index on this page)
• "Topic Categories" needs to be height aligned with the top of the first module in the left sidebar

Category Pages

• left align subject names with topic names (again, do this for the whole page)
• "Browse Category Name" needs to be height aligned with the top of the first module in the left sidebar and left aligned with the Category intro / description (if there is one)

Subject Pages

• Let's get rid of the yellow alert box and text that says "get trusted recommendations"
• Let's height align the top of the Subject Tilte with the top of the first module in the left sidebar

Topic Page

• Align Topic Titles with Topic Descriptions
• On the topic page, let's get rid of the yellow box around the "Add this list to your MySpace page" and "Speed Rate" - but let's keep the links. Just get rid of the box.
• on the topic page, get rid of the space between the bottom of the line of google links (belwo the description), and the line of text where the yellow box was)
• The icons disappeared in the "actions" box
• We need to reduce the width of the musestorm widget on the topic page below the list, so that it right aligns with the list

Item Page

• Yahoo Maps are misaligned (local items)
• Align Item titles with Item descriptions
• On the item page, let's right align the review box with the gray description box
• We need to left align the "reviews of item name" (on the item page) text above the reviews, with the rest of the column's content
• The ratings breakdown graph is not showing up on the item pages

Multiple Pages

subhome / cat / sub / topic / item: Top Left Google ad module needs another line or two of whitespace after breadcrumb (for logged in users only - not logged in see the RIA intro box)

Recent Comments Page

align content to width of header on recent comments page

Breadcrumb Navigation

I'd like to make the breadcrumb navigation at the top of every page, black

we need a line of whitespace above the breadcrumb navigation below the nav bar

New additions page: right aligment of boxes need to match header

about us: let's get rid of Hottest Topics / Hottest Weblists (i assume this is why the about us page is so slow)

Rolling in the new design at about 4PM PST

Guys, in the next 15 minutes or so we're going to be dropping in the new home page and adjusting the style sheet for the rest of the pages. Things could be a tad ugly over the weekend. Please send all feedback and things you see that are screwed up to me.

A Sneak Peek at the New Home Page

This page has been a real bear to get to load fast, because it's crunching a lot of data. It tells what lists people are rating, what items people are rating, who is rating the most, who is getting the most helpful and funny votes are... and more. And all in three hour increments, so it's fresh data all the time. It's a real snapshot of what - and who - is hot in the world of RIA at any one time. It's like the recent comments page on steroids (no, not THOSE steroids).

Here's the new home page. We're going to make a few final tweaks tomorrow and hopefully roll it out.

New Home Page Coming

So we're finally getting close to implementing the new home page we've been working on for a while. The current home page is OK, but it's too stale. That whole big yellow bar at the top never changes.

With RateItAll cranking out so much useful data in terms of what's hot at any one moment, it seemed a shame not to build this sort of info into a fresh, constantly updated home page.

So here goes - I'm going to share the various components of the new page, and take a shot at explaining what everthing does.






This is the new nav bar. As you can see, we have pretty much all of the key links (recent reviews, tags, topics, local) all spread across the nav. There's no shortcuts on the new nav bar, but pretty much all of the shortcut links are built into the nav itself.






















And here's my favorite part of the new page. Here we have raw data being crunched, with plenty of tabs to take different views. In the "Hot Lists" section, you can check out which RIA and member lists are being rated in real time. The Featured Lists are set by admins, but now allow you to see ten instead of five by toggling the "older." And finally, the Hottest Items section shows which items are getting rated the most at any given time. The tabs let you filter by a couple of categories.

























On the right hand side of the new home page, we've added an ad block (we may replace this with a testimonial - revenue shmevenue). We've also added a local directory module as well. The best part about this feature is that you can customize it to your city by clicking the "not your city?" link.


























And this is my other favorite part of the new page. In this reviewers tab, you can see which reviewers are most active, most helpful, and funniest TODAY. Fresh data. So if you write a bunch of quality reviews and get some helpful votes, this is a way for you to show up on the home page. This module also lets you see the newest reviewers (who have added a pic).




















Finally, at the bottom of the home page, we have a new section called News & Tips. This section feeds headlines in right from the blog so you'll always know if there are new posts without having to go to the blog. There's also a Tips & Resources which display static links to useful sections for newbies.

I'm hoping we're going to be able to push this live by the end of the week. For a little while at least, we'll leave the old home page accessible so people can get used to the new look gradually.

For the moment, none of the other pages will change, except for the new nav bar which will apply to all pages.

A Sneak Peek

The recent helpful, funny, agree changes to reviews also have corresponding display implications.

I haven't been crazy about the home page for a while. There's too much static content, and too much of an emphasis on telling people what the site does. I want a page that shows what the site does.

Here's a sneak peek of a portion of a revised home page we're working on. Note the reviewer module on the bottom right that highlights the daily most active, most helpful, most agreed with, and funniest reviewer. I think it's going to be cool.