Launch Giveaway V: Followup
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Firstly, I would like to thank everyone who participated in this contest. Without your input, this site would not be what it is, and so from the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank each and every one of your for contributing.
This contest was not held because we needed to do something on one day for the prize giveaway, but rather, because we wanted to know what you, the readers, thought about the site so that we can improve on it to serve you better. With that in mind, here are all your comments and what is going to happen next:
Scoring Reviews
This was something me and Doug discussed before we started the site and we both decided to not have a universal scoring system for our reviews. The reason for this is that we have many writers doing reviews and what someone might think of as great may only be good in another’s opinion. On top of that, if we gave a product a high score (say 90% or 4.5 out of 5 stars) and a better one came out later, how should we score it? 95%? 5 out of 5? And if an even better one came out later? I hope you see what we are getting at.
Instead, we decided to have a What I Like About It and What Could be Improved section in the review. This would highlight what we thought were useful features and what could be improved and we let the readers decide if the software is right for them. For example, some might consider VGA support an unimportant feature while others might and so, when we highlight this, we think it is better than giving it a universal score.
Login Link
Instead of moving it to the top, how about I do one better and give you a shortcut. Now, by pressing Ctrl + E, you will bring up the login box, wherever you may be on this site. How’s that?
P.S. This only works when you are not logged into the site so for those of you who want to experiment with it, do log out first. Also, if this does not work for you, do let me know which OS and browser you are using.
Site Layout
We do have plans to make the top lighter and move the content around a bit as well but this will only be done after launch. So be sure to check back then.
Partial Feeds
We have now cut the feed so that it is only a partial feed which is similar to what you are seeing on the main site. So if you want to read more, just click the link to get to the article.
We understand that some might prefer a full feed so let us know your thoughts on this.
Mobile Site
We had a mobile site but the recent upgrade of our system rendered it in-operational. We have since fixed it and you should be able to access the mobile version from your Pocket PC (or any other mobile device for that matter) from now on.
Applications On Different Device
This is going to be rather hard to implement because we are limited by what we have. The beauty of Windows Mobile is that as long as you are using the same OS and screen resolution, you can be assured that what you see will be what’s on your screen. Other than that, maybe you could donate devices to us and we would be more than glad to show it to you 
Open Sites In New Tab
We have made changes to our site such that all links will now open in a new tab.
Again, like the partial feed, some might like it, others might not, so we will try this out (opening sites in new window) for now and if you prefer it not to, let us know so we can gauge user response.
Comment Fields
Now when you are logged in, the Name, Email and URL field will be removed so you will not be confused as to whether or not you need to fill it up. Another great reason to register on the site.
Comment Editing
We have implemented comment editing to a certain degree. Now, after you leave a comment, you have 15 minutes to make any changes. You will see a timer only for your comments and all you need to do is hover your mouse over the comment and click on it to make the changes. Be sure to make those changes within 15 minutes though because after that, you will not be able to.
Confirmation Emails
Don’t you just hate it when you send an email to someone but you are not sure if the email got sent because of server issues? Well now we have implemented a confirmation email such that when you send an email, you will also receive a confirmation to let you know that the server is working properly and that the email was delivered to us.
Well that’s it from me for the site improvement. If you have any other suggestion on improving the site, do let us know about it. Doug will be discussing the editorial suggestions that you have given us later today so be sure to check those out as well.
Related posts
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
It is very nice to see a site that is so responsive to its guests requests.
Thank you very much.
Edit: and I tried the new “edit comment” feature , and evidently, it works great.
You guys keep us going
This is good, the comments section here is probably the best I’ve seen on any PPC blog ever!
Thanks Stefan. Couldn’t have done it without the input given by readers like you.
Has the partial feed already come in to affect? At a quick glance i couldn’t locate any feed with partial data.
I would like to be able to download the entire feed rather than part of it. To keep the device connected always is not practical for me. WiFi sucks the battery power like beer and GPRS is not yet fast enough in my part of the world and we are still waiting for 3G service. (I am from India). I download my feeds once and disconnect my device. I would rather spend an extra minute to download the data in one go and read all the information offline than keeping the device connected continuously.
All the feeds from this site are very interesting and i go through each and every feed. And being able to read everything offline is the best of all.
Beer sucks battery power too?
3G is a killer for battery power as well, in my experience. If I’m on the GSM band (GPRS, but not connected) my battery lasts a lot longer than when I’m on the UMTS band (also unconnected to the 3G network, but the icon is there displaying that I can access this data network).
Personally I also download the feeds, then disconnect, and then read the stuff. And especially on devices, feeds are usually grouped so that when you click a feed, you get a list of the articles, so here long articles won’t be a problem, because you know in advance then when you open an article called “Pocket Informant review”, it will be a lengthy article. The only time that long articles can be troublesome is, as far as I’m concerned, when scrolling through them in Internet Explorer 7’s feeds view. And on the PC the amount of data downloaded doesn’t really matter these days, so I think that the points of consideration are: on one had, on devices it’s more efficient to download the entire article in the feed, saving - let’s say - 30 seconds of loading the full site. On the other hand, it requires a little bit of extra scrolling on the PC.
So for me the best solution is to break reviews manually after the intro, but for example the contest posts and winner announcements should stay in the feed full length, in my opinion.
Good point Stefan. We will keep this in mind when we decide though for now we will take a look-and-see approach and see how that goes.
Yes it has already gone into effect actually but you might not see it because the articles since it went into effect are short. We will continue to monitor this and see if any changes are necessary.