Help us test a new feature?

Hi All, we just pushed something that we think is pretty cool - it's a new home page (for not logged in users), that shows off some of our amazing "river" functionality. Basically, it lets you easily subscribe to the topics that you are interested in, making your river fill up with not just the posts from people you follow, but also from topics you follow (e.g. Politics, Gadgets, Movies).

Here's how you can help us out with testing.

1) Logout
2) Go to the RateItAll home page, and try clicking on various icons (note how the river updates dynamically each time)
3) when you come up with a combination of topics that you are happy with (and note that you can "view more" on topics to select from 21 different ones), click "Save Your Feed" and then login. Your new topics will then be added to your feed.

I love this new home page - I think it's incredibly interactive, and is a nice show of force for our database. BTW, if you like the icons, tell Lena.

One More Big Fix Live

Since the launch of V3, one of the biggest complaints we've heard from folks who use the site a lot was in regards to the Home / River page.

Here was the problem:

If you paged down a few pages to see recent reviews on the home page, then clicked off on something, and then clicked back on the browser - the page was not remembering that you had paged down. In order to get back to the view you were on, you had to page down again.

This was annoying for a lot of folks.

This is now fixed - please try it out.

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.

Home Page Tweak

Guys, you can now start making a new rating list right from the home page - check out the middle panel of the yellow section. No need to dig down through your profile page.