JohnKrist wrote:Kulverstukas, I never said that I don't trust Alexa showing a trend, however it is partly irrelevant is it doesn't compare us to our peers but to every site on the web. Site visits is a better marker for such narrow fields as aviation interest. Looking at other sites shows a decline in visits, but not 30% as Alexa rank implies. The site IS getting better every week. Compare to the white site and tell me I am wrong...
I took a few months away from here and figured heck, I used to spend so much time on here, might as well log in and see if it's gotten any better....I see they've made it blue. Don't see a whole lot of other changes.
No offense John, but when you're part of a website dedicate to aviation pictures and conversations, having a site that fails pretty hard at both isn't a great way to try and drive traffic or better the user experience. And using a cop out like "oh well, head dev guy is on vacay," isn't helping either. Seems that's either an admission that there only is ONE developer working on it, or they're in charge of a bunch of unpaid interns who don't have the authority to make any changes themselves.
Don't take this as a personal attack; I realize you're all unpaid volunteers (Which really should give you all the leverage, make DM pay you...If you guys don't do it, they'll have to have their own people do it, and I can't imagine they have anyone doing pro bono work on staff) You're all being taken advantage of and get stuck defending this site while the ownership can't be bothered to try and save face. It's quite sad.
We're going on what, 3 months since the update? And there's still issues with copyright bars on images, logging in, image resolution, and even displaying the home page depending on how big your screen is? This isn't the early days of the internet anymore; a competent web dev team would have discovered these things during beta testing, prior to going live. It's been three months since and it's still in shambles.
I know you like to say that the old site was broken beyond repair, but it was still much more functional than this one. It's analogous to saying, well, we were driving an old Mercedes S class, and the Nav was broken, and so was the passenger seat heater, and the rear left parcel shelf speaker. It's hopeless, not worth the effort to fix, so we've traded it in for a Tata Nano, which won't have any of those issues, it's a great upgrade! Oh, and instead of keeping the S class exclusive, by chargin a fee, we're going to let every Tom Dick and Harry hop in the Tata and have a say. The quality of discussion has dropped dramatically, as has the number of posts on decent threads.
I'll check back here in a few months and continue hoping that somehow, someway, someone can fix this place. I miss the insightful intelligent conversation. From my own experience, I can say there's a lot of people in my airline's SOCC browsing a lot of things that aren't A.net. And not just one or two people, but nearly the entire SOCC. And a good portion of said people had been on this site in various forms for upwards of 10 years. JP, AVH, etc, are showing up a lot more in our browsing histories, and JP seems to be the source of most people's desktops. Food for thought. Would have thought a high quality update and improvements would drive traffic, and thus revenue. Oh well.
