Posted by Shane W on February 4, 2009
Recently DealTaker went through a homepage redesign which, by design, was meant to provide advancements in usability for our visitors. I wanted to take a moment to outline the changes and provide some insight into the goals behind each of the major changes.
Changing the Width of the Site
Our development team needed to re-evaluate what the optimal width of our site should be. Previously the width of our site was set to 720 pixels wide and now our width is set to 960 pixels. This increase provides us with 33% more space to offer our users easier ways to navigate the site.
New Navigation Menus
When we increased the width of our pages we thought about how we could provide better ways to navigate our deals and coupons sections of the site. After discussions we decided we could take advantage of our categorization system to enable users to view smaller portions of our site and find more of the deals they’re interested in more quickly.
New Hot Deals Presentation
A lot of the changes revolving around the hot deals section revolve around programmatic problems from the previous version. In an interest to provide more hot deals on one page we increased the amount to four and in doing so introduced some bugs in the old code. Our development team decided we couldn’t release the code as-is and decided to start from scratch and add an auto-scroll to allow users to view all the hot deals in an updated and more efficient manner.
Reduce Page Load Time
Finally, we wanted to reduce how long it takes to load our home page. The first step in doing this was to update our main navigation to CSS based buttons from image based buttons. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets allow us to create buttons that look like our old image based buttons but because it does not rely on an image file it reduces how long it takes to load our page. The second measure in reducing page loads was to remove the rounded corners from our content areas. The reason this reduces page loads is because in order to create those rounded corners it takes a table surrounding our content and 8 images. That’s right, 8 images for a little rounded corner. While this doesn’t reduce page load very much, because we used the same images for all of our content boxes, it reduces it enough to matter to someone who is on dial-up.
With all of these changes we are trying to evolve how our site is used by our visitors and plan to continue to improve how our site functions so that we can keep you coming back to find all those great deals and coupons we are committed to providing to you.
Happy shopping from the DealTaker development team!
Posted by admin on September 8, 2006
Well, we’re currently going through a lot of changes here at DealTaker. Over the next few weeks, we’re moving offices to a few miles away (bigger, better, etc).
Also, we’re moving our servers. We’ve been working hard to get our new machines up to our quality standards, then we’ll move them to the data center. Here’s a quick look at what some of them look like 
Posted by admin on August 24, 2006
Just some random thoughts of the day:
Hopefully our loyal visitors have found the new images on our homepage next to the products to be a useful tool in your bargain hunting.
It’s only late-August, but people are already starting to talk about the upcomming holiday season. Usually, I enjoy warm places, but wow, with such a hot summer here in TX, planning a vacation in a cool location doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.
Over the next 2-3 months we’re going to be very busy, working on some great new features, and continuing our redesign, by adding some new look & features to our forums, as well as other things, so I’ll try to blog as items get complete, but it may be a bit less frequent.
Be sure to check out http://www.dealtaker.com often, so you don’t miss our on some great new contests & other stuff we’ll have going on!
Posted by admin on August 2, 2006
I checked DealTaker, and couldn’t resist ordering another computer for the kids playroom. For $404, it’s a Dimension Pentium 4 with 1 gb ram, 17″ LCD monitor & more. Check it out here.
On the DealTaker front, we’re still fixing some bugs & stuff from the recent upgrade, and we’re happy to announce that we now have Newegg listed in our stores section, which a lot of folks have been requesting recently. In addition we are finishing a new page so you can see all the coupons which will expire soon, so you can’t say “Oh, I can’t believe I missed it” anymore. Click here for a preview. We’ll add a link on our current coupons page on DealTaker soon.
Keep watching here for more updates soon!
Posted by admin on July 31, 2006
A lot of people have been requesting the Old Homepage, and we are going to continue to keep that around as an ‘advanced view’, as well as clean it up a bit, and give registered users the option of choosing one of the other as their default. In addition, we’re continually working on the searching. Right now it says ‘entire site’ where it really means, ‘all deal areas’, but hopefully Thursday or Friday of this week, we’ll have that cleaned up. Also, the PriceTaker data is undergoing a cleanup and we’re adding more and more stores worth of data too!
Have a great day everyone!
Posted by admin on July 18, 2006
PriceTaker is now up & running, and loaded with millions of products. Everything from DVD’s & Ipods to Vacuums and Tools. While the site is live, and working, we still have some great plans for additional features, and we’ll be adding more and more stores to the databases.
Posted by admin on July 15, 2006
I hope everyone is having a great weekend, and getting all the fun in the sun you can, before the summer is over.
If you’re not yet familiar with XML Feeds, it’s just a way for companies like us to provide our data so users like you can suck it in to various programs and present it as you wish. For 2 years now, we’ve provided our Deals Data Feed, and have had lots of users add it to their my-yahoo pages, and Firefox browsers, as well as other formats too. Well, we’re currently working on adding the ability to get our Coupons, as well as separate feeds for each of our Categories in the Deals forum into XML format too! Hopefully we’ll have this released within a week.
Another exclusive update for all our blog users is that we’ll soon have all the Amazon products in our PriceTaker price search engine. With the addition of their millions of products you should see even better results when searching for products. I’ll fill you in next week when we have more information on this.
Have a great rest of the weekend!
Posted by admin on July 13, 2006
As a special treat for the blog viewers, here’s a sneak peek of our new logo.
We’ll be updating our DealTaker site with the logo and a new updated look in the coming weeks!
Posted by admin on July 12, 2006
Well, here’s where you can ask me anything you want to know. About me, about DealTaker, or about anything else.
Here’s a quickie update on the DealTaker sites though:
- DealTaker – we just rolled out the ability to view all the deals by category, and now we’re feverishly working on a new homepage and look to make the site even easier for new users & old alike.
- CouponTaker – it’s finally ready! Have a look at all the Coupons. There’s even more to come!
- PriceTaker – Our Newest site, PriceTaker is now working, so check out the savings. Just enter the product you want, and you’ll know the best prices and where to buy it.
- We’re on the verge of sending out a new newsletter with some great new information, the latest Deals and some great shopping tips. Be sure you’re registered at DealTaker and have the ability to get email from admins selected! (in My Controls | Email Settings).
- We have another 5 or so great features we’re working on to be rolled out before the end of October. While they’re still under heavy development, and I can’t give you a peek yet, it’s going to be a holiday season we’ll hopefully never forget!
As you can probably tell, I’m so excited at all the new things we’re working on, I just can’t wait until it’s all out there for everyone to see!
