First glimpses of my new baby..... Blog Discussion

Former_MSE_Neil

Martin has requested that I post on this thread to answer some of your queries.

As part of the development team I will ensure that the correct standards are followed both from an accessibility standpoint as well as specific browser based markup. I will endeavour to create a site that will work in all browsers. We do currently ensure that the features work on both firefox and internet explorer and we are striving to bring some of what we regard as the "legacy" applications towards working on a cross browser basis.

In regards to IE7beta it will be considered - however this application is still so very "buggy" and has a number of issues which will have to be removed on an application level before it becomes live and hence it will be a huge resource to ensure compatibility with a beta that may actually be completely modified when the full version is released.

The 800pixel fixed width was decided to aid the design of the site. With a fixed width the graphical designer can create images and designs which he knows will look the same on every machine, it is also very poor etiquette to create a page that does not render correctly on any pc – and judging by our statistics there are still a large number of 800x600 users!

As for the search engine for the site – I assume by “the site” you are referring solely to the chat forums? Currently we are working to improve the search feature on the main site that’s the one on www.moneysavingexpert.com this will hopefully fall into action very soon. As for the chat forum search this is an entirely separate beast, we have plans to upgrade a few things in the very near future and this should improve the search – so we are led to believe. However, a three letter search is very unlikely to appear because we now have 1,843,708 posts to search through and most three letter words would potentially yield thousands of results and put a huge drain on the database. The forum search as a whole works ‘ok’ and using some of the tips in SRA’s A-Z here may help your searches further.

I hope that has gone some way to answer some of your questions. I will keep an eye on this thread and continue to reply if it seems necessary. However, with every new design/concept there are bound to be people who hate it or love it, the point is we have to move forward and hopefully we will reach a place where the large majority are happy.



MSE Neil

wolfman

Things such as "more" or "click here" would be nice to be rid of in terms of usability.

Maybe a nice table-less css (standard compliant) design to help keep total page loads down as these seem quite high on some pages at the moment. And clearer evidence of Rss feeds (maybe using the typical orange logo).

Also printable versions of pages. Can be easily done by switching out a common style sheet with a print friendly one.

Refining the navigation is a good idea. It's a little confusing having so many places to navigate from.

Oh, and I think 800x600 is a good choice. You can only stretch text so far across a screen before it becomes a pain having to scroll your eyes the width of the screen.

fannyadams

As long as it's W3C compliant it will work for ANY browser (yes even glitchy IE7) with the added 'bonus' of being compaitble for persons with a disability. <waves>
It doesn't take much to make a site w3c complaint if you use the right coding in the first place.
Hec, there's even a site for you to check your coding - http://validator.w3.org
HTHS

wolfman

fannyadams wrote:

As long as it's W3C compliant it will work for ANY browser (yes even glitchy IE7)

Not always, different browsers > different rendering engines. Especially when it comes to css. Classic example is the way in which IE and the Gecko engine handle padding differently. So to a certain extent even if it is compliant you still need to check the outcome in each browser.