Hey all -- it's been a few months since I wrote anything about BetterWindowsSoftware. We've made some major changes to hopefully improve the site. A few changes are purely aesthetic, but usability is always in mind.
BetterWindowsSoftware.com
The biggest improvement is entirely behind the scenes. The page caching system allows the server to relax even under the much greater traffic load. Most pages should load faster than three months ago... even though our traffic is 30x greater than a few months ago, the pages are loading faster than before the caching system was implemented.
The default theme has been switched to the "vista-esque" theme. It was the most popular selection of users who switched the theme from the previous default (which was the simple "blue" theme). Here's all of the themes.
The "screenshots" block that appears in many of the search results pages has been improved to show images with reflections. This simple graphical technique looks so good, yet it was easy to implement. Here's an example of a category page and a search results page.
Trivial tweaks to the "Popular Search" and categories listings (example: Nature Screen Savers and the individual listing pages.
Some of the other behind the scenes improvements were made to insure that our listings are not hijacked programs that are listed by hackers or SPAM site affiliates. To filter these out, we've added at least a dozen more sites to our domains blacklist table.
The user-comments system is coming very soon. It is in the final stages of development, but I have a thread on the ideas here: http://www.frihost.com/forums/vt-87119.html -
BetterWindowsSoftware.com
The biggest improvement is entirely behind the scenes. The page caching system allows the server to relax even under the much greater traffic load. Most pages should load faster than three months ago... even though our traffic is 30x greater than a few months ago, the pages are loading faster than before the caching system was implemented.
The default theme has been switched to the "vista-esque" theme. It was the most popular selection of users who switched the theme from the previous default (which was the simple "blue" theme). Here's all of the themes.
The "screenshots" block that appears in many of the search results pages has been improved to show images with reflections. This simple graphical technique looks so good, yet it was easy to implement. Here's an example of a category page and a search results page.
Trivial tweaks to the "Popular Search" and categories listings (example: Nature Screen Savers and the individual listing pages.
Some of the other behind the scenes improvements were made to insure that our listings are not hijacked programs that are listed by hackers or SPAM site affiliates. To filter these out, we've added at least a dozen more sites to our domains blacklist table.
The user-comments system is coming very soon. It is in the final stages of development, but I have a thread on the ideas here: http://www.frihost.com/forums/vt-87119.html -
