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!

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 upcoming 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!

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!