Welcome to the new whathifi.com!

[Jota180]

and change the dark grey to absolute black. Looks much better and black has always been a part of the brand.

Or have the option to choose your own themes/colours?

I prefer the grey as it's not such a big contrast and less tiring on the eyes.

 

[Andrew17321]

Sorry folks, you have managed to turn a well-made, easy to manage website to one of the worst I have ever seen. It is NOT a case of getting used to it. The amount of information available on a screen is halved, navigation is difficult and the tiles effect on the home screen is laughable. It has become a joke. Who on earth decided this was better?

Have they said that this is the finished artcle or work in progress? All it's going to take is a bit of tweaking on layout. Hardly the end of the world.

Not the end of the world, but for me, the end of daily visits to what was a great site. I'll maybe have a look again in August. It will need more than a bit of tweaking to get its ease of use and readability back to what it was.

Sorry, bye
Andrew

 

[dalethorn]

Welcome to the brand-new whathifi.com. We've spent the last 12 months rebuilding the site from the ground up, adding more products, more pages, improved search, additional functionality and, for the first time, a full user review programme so you can submit your own reviews.

The site is fully responsive, so will automatically reformat depending on the type of device you're viewing it on - laptop, desktop, smartphone or tablet. We've put a large search box at the top of the homepage so it's easier to find the product you're looking for, and introduced new sections for the most popular products.

Price comparison is fully integrated into our reviews and you can now submit your own reviews of products you own via the User Reviews tab. Regular posters will have the opportunity to qualify for an 'Approved User Reviewer' or 'Top Contributor' badge if we think their reviews are up to scratch.

Please note that all user reviews will go through a formal moderation process, so may not appear on the site for 24 hours until they've been processed by our external moderators. You will receive an email confirmation when you're review has been uploaded.

We'd really appreciate your feedback, so feel free to leave comments on this thread or use the red Feedback tab on the right of the page. We can't promise to fix everything, but we'll do our best.

Most decent sites have options for ipad to view desktop view (full screen), and apparently yours does not. That's VERY BAD as this is a horrible view.

 

[Paulo Sergio Nied]

I have been accessing the site daily for three years now. I enjoy reading the reviews. When I found out about the new layout I just felt the urge to register to express my opinion.

This new Fischer Price layout is hideus! I will come back in a few weeks and hope that the old site is back. Please fix it!!!!

 

[robinkiddy]

I can only hope that others comments are taken on board and not dismissed. Its taken me days to logon. I dont know why I needed to change password but the necessary email was never found. I am now robinkiddy and robinkidderminster is lost forever? I tried emailing, feedback etc to no avail. My tablet hates the new site - I had to revert to PC to reregister.

Is it worth (our) while detailing the problems? I hope so since I have been a regular reader/contributor for about 4 years but I am really disappointed with the new site. Seems OK on PC now though the comments about colour, font & layout are all valid. On tablet its unuseable. Not easy to read or navigate seems to be set up for portrait/phone users. Cant zoom into text so difficult to read on smaller phone.

Missing bio - why?

If anyone cares I really would like my robinkidderminster password. Sorry WHF - the old site worked perfectly for me. I think it important to see that our comments are acted upon - a developer section to confirm that specific comments received are being worked on - otherwise comments will simply critisize and people will give up.

Sorry

Why do text entry boxes go grey - cant read them. Slow. Jumpy like kangaroo. Edit is unpredictable. Awful.

 

[Electro]

Is it just me or is the forum not working yet ?

When I click on Forum I jiust get " page not found " as in the link below

http://www.whathifi.com/news/site-offline

If I am doing something wrong please help me *help*

Apart from this I quite like the new look *good*

You need to clear your browser's cache (or offline files) out - I was getting the same on one machine today until I completed this.

Done this , it is all working well now . Thanks for the info *yahoo*

 

[Vladimir]

Haha I love the Fisher Price analogy. *mosking*

 

[Cynic-al]

I wasn't a regular poster but I would scour the forums most days.

I will look back in a week to see if you've come to your senses if not Ta Ta.

 

[relocated]

Even when 'logged in' the Forum status shows as being 'Offline'. Viewing the forums page is ridiculously tiring as there are huge bright white bars either side of the nicely grey background of the discussions.

Andy, are you going to actually answer questions that have been put to you?

I realise that some people are obviously just putting the boot in but there are others [me included] that are commenting and giving information in the hope that we will help you sort out the mess WHF has got itself into.

Edit: It seems that you only become 'Online" after posting to the Forum. [ Chrome running on Mavericks Mac Air]

 

[Deleted member 2457]

I can barely log in! *dash1*

 

[Deleted member 2457]

I can only hope that others comments are taken on board and not dismissed. Its taken me days to logon. I dont know why I needed to change password but the necessary email was never found. I am now robinkiddy and robinkidderminster is lost forever? I tried emailing, feedback etc to no avail. My tablet hates the new site - I had to revert to PC to reregister.

Is it worth (our) while detailing the problems? I hope so since I have been a regular reader/contributor for about 4 years but I am really disappointed with the new site. Seems OK on PC now though the comments about colour, font & layout are all valid. On tablet its unuseable. Not easy to read or navigate seems to be set up for portrait/phone users. Cant zoom into text so difficult to read on smaller phone.

Missing bio - why?

If anyone cares I really would like my robinkidderminster password. Sorry WHF - the old site worked perfectly for me. I think it important to see that our comments are acted upon - a developer section to confirm that specific comments received are being worked on - otherwise comments will simply critisize and people will give up.

Sorry

Why do text entry boxes go grey - cant read them. Slow. Jumpy like kangaroo. Edit is unpredictable. Awful.

That's terrible.

 

[John Duncan]

If anyone cares I really would like my robinkidderminster password.

I care. I can see your user account (http://www.whathifi.com/users/robinkidderminster) but I can't actually edit it, since most of the administrative rights I had previously have disappeared. I will work with Andy to see if we can resolve.

 

[iQ Speakers]

OK on a iphone i go into HiFi from home page.

Two boxs appear both different heights Show Me and Sort by

Under "Go to" you get Products, News Best Buys .... select "products" and i get 423 can not read other number as it falls off the edge. So i want to look at amps, can not do it? Sorry i stand corrected scrolled down through a load of product and an advert past Digital TV boxes an Home Cimema under HIFI and there they are Product types bingo, how intuative was that? And i can honestly say i only found the products as i was typing this it came as a surprise.

 

[Crocodile]

A separate sub-forum, even if only temporary, where each point raised can have it's own thread & hopefully discussed rationally. Otherwise valid criticism risks being lost in the sea of noise.

My thoughts on the forums:

The forum list white background is too bright.

The pale blue thread titles are too pale & too small.

The thing is just too big on a desktop. I've reduced FF to 60% but then when posting it's too small.

Don't like the way the post content is repeated as a title if there isn't one.

Why on earth does a carriage return still insert an extra line-space when posting?

Can't cut & paste, supposedly due to "browser setting", but can on every other site.

But the BIG question is why not take this opportunity to implement decent, feature rich forum software?

 

[robinkiddy]

Thanks for caring. Feeling a little sad though struggling to find good comments :-(
Cheers

 

[Neptune_Twilight]

I don't understand why the forum has become so slow, there is a lag of up to ten seconds to access parts of the site including the forums - I have the fastest download speed available in the UK courtesy of Virgin fibre, (160 megabit) it's slower than sites based in Oz I frequent - Has What-Hi-Fi changed it’s hosts with the new forum as it's almost unusable on the speed aspect alone?

I routinely clear all browser cache with Ccleaner & I know it's not this PC which is also as fast as PC's get.

 

[Andy Clough]

Is it just me or is the forum not working yet ?

When I click on Forum I jiust get " page not found " as in the link below

http://www.whathifi.com/news/site-offline

If I am doing something wrong please help me *help*

Apart from this I quite like the new look *good*

That's the link to the old site just before we took it down, so you need to clear that URL and go to www.whathifi.com. You may need to clear your cache and refresh your browser.

 

[Andy Clough]

Andy - don't let the B*******s grind you down.It will get there . I am sure you are disappointed at the feedback but it is unnecessarily vehement and I cannot believe the number of undead who suddenly leap out of the woodwork to criticise. If these undead had tried the beta ,they would have known what they were about to receive.If some want to ignore the site forever after this reconstruction,then they can carry on with their blinkered life but I bet they'll be back for the increased info when it has settled down-and there will be no apology-rest assured because they will remain undead.

Of course there are things that need tweaking,but I suspect a lot of these people haven't gone beyond the forum and into the expansion of a lot of other parts of the site ,especially the product side.

Keep on tweaking.(yes the colour scheme could be a little less Fisher Price)

Oh- and despite the problems,that t**t Beckham still made it through. 🙂

Thanks for your support RGD. We are having a few teething problems, inevitably. It's a big change and some functionality that we tested on Beta seems to have broken in the move to live which is annoying. I'm making a note of all the issues and the dev team is on standby next week to try and fix them. Most will need a code change, so we'd rather do as many fixes as we can in one go, which may take a week or two, rather than handle them all piecemeal.

Clearly the font/button size is the biggest issue, and I'll make reducing that the No.1 priority next week when I've discussed it with the UX team. There was never going to be a 'perfect' time to launch the new site, and it's a shame more people didn't respond to the Beta test over the last few weeks as earlier feedback would have been really helpful, but there you go. We're listening, and will prioritise the key improvements so they get implemented as soon as we can.

PS: I have asked for the Beckham ads to be turned off as they're driving me nuts too!

 

[Andy Clough]

Sorry folks, you have managed to turn a well-made, easy to manage website to one of the worst I have ever seen. It is NOT a case of getting used to it. The amount of information available on a screen is halved, navigation is difficult and the tiles effect on the home screen is laughable. It has become a joke. Who on earth decided this was better?

Have they said that this is the finished artcle or work in progress? All it's going to take is a bit of tweaking on layout. Hardly the end of the world.

This is most definitely NOT the finished article, we have only just released the site from Beta. The pages you see now are not complete, the designs we have include additional elements, blocks and page furniture that will be added as part of the phase 2/3 rollout over the next few months, which is why you are currently seeing white space to the right of the main body copy on News/reviews etc.

Please bear with us. A huge amount of work has gone into the backend engineering of the new site, and that has been extremely complex. The front end that you're seeing will undergo tweaks and upgrades as we go along, and we'll take on board the feedback we're getting here. I can't promise to fix everything overnight, but we are listening.

 

[Andy Clough]

Andy, are you going to actually answer questions that have been put to you?

I realise that some people are obviously just putting the boot in but there are others [me included] that are commenting and giving information in the hope that we will help you sort out the mess WHF has got itself into.

Relocated, see my multiple previous answers. I have been on the Forums constantly every day since we relaunched, including today (Saturday) when I could be sitting in the sunshine in my garden

Your feedback is important, and I am logging all the key issues with the dev team. Our head of UX is back from holiday, and I will sit down with him first thing Monday morning to go through all the design issues. We can't fix everything overnight (and not at the weekend!), but we'll do our best.

Every time as a business we've launched a new website (Autocar, PistonHeads, Stuff etc) we've taken a huge amount of flak from people who didn't like the changes. It comes with the territory, and that's fine. But after a couple of months we work through the issues and try to resolve them. That's what we'll do here.

 

[Neptune_Twilight]

it's a shame more people didn't respond to the Beta test over the last few weeks as earlier feedback would have been really helpful, but there you go.

With due respect: I among others did respond to the overly large size of the fonts during (on day one) the very limited beta test & you did say it was felt among yourselves this was an issue & was going to be looked into but was it was never not addressed - You feel now (again?) the fonts are the biggest problem but it's hardly fair to blame anyone but yourselves now? I did keep looking back at the beta but as the fonts were never reduced & I went back to using the old site, as reiterating feedback was pointless.

 

[Crossie]

This site looks horrible and so many things do not work properly. Old site please, please, please...

 

[Andy Clough]

I fully accept that the font size is an issue, and yes that came up in Beta. As I explained earlier, rather than do piecemeal changes in an ad hoc manner, we want to gauge all the feedback and then try and do upgrades in 'blocks' of work at a time as many require a code change.

We rely on a centralised dev team within the business, and unfortunately I do not have access to them 24/7. We have to book time with them around the other sites we publish to get the changes implemented. That is what I will be doing on Monday.

 

[Hi-FiOutlaw]

Hi Andy,

you keep telling that the signature didn't migrate from old site, but you can't upload one, and some of the avatars have migraded but mine was lost, and can't find how to do it in my profile *help*

And why the red bar that has WHF logo and Products News etc.. Keeps coming down, using ipad with the keybord on screen?

Can't post pic, the HTML opcion is gone know, and and i've tried a few times in the new menu but couldn't find how it's done....

Please don't complicate things, posting pics was quite simple....

 

[KiwiMoto]

Look, you're on a hiding to nothing Andy.

It's in need of an awful lot of work to get it in shape and if you spend months trying to sort it out it's pretty obvious that the site traffic is going to plunge drastically.

Using the excuse 'oh but we let you people beta test it' sounds like a cop out.

It's in the best interests of Haymarket, the WHF brand, and the massive amount of passionate and loyal people who frequent this place to get it right.

And I haven't even mentioned the advertisers, no doubt if this backlash continues they'd seriously have to look at their continued support.

Is it an option to put the old site back up at least temporarily while this one gets reworked?

It wouldn't be seen as a failure, more of a logical business decision.

That's my ten cents worth, it's better than just complaining and leaving altogether.