In my time here DealTaker has nearly doubled the number of full-time employees and we have become part of the Media General family. Also in that same time-frame I have seen the economy go from good in 2007 to bad in 2008 to worse in 2009. Then there was the presidential election where we as a country decided that it was ‘time for a change’ and elected our new president Barack Obama.

About the time when Media General made the decision that they would acquire DealTaker I made the decision it was time for me to treat myself. I decided I was going to begin looking at houses and cars and make a decision on one or the other. My first inclination was to buy a house so that I could stop paying rent and at least retain some of the money I was spending on housing expenses.  After much research I found that the housing market was experiencing a slump and it looked like things were going to get much worse before they got better.

So I set off on my search to find a newer car. I started looking at a new Nissan Rogue and used, low mileage, BMW 5-series initially. I had previously owned a 1986 BMW 528e, not unlike the one pictured, and loved the car which prompted my initial look at the 5-series. Not to mention the 4-year 50,000 mile no-cost maintenance program. What drew me to the Rogue was that it had what Nissan calls “Intelligent Key” which allows you unlock and start the car without taking the key out of your pocket.

On a whim I decided to drop by the BMW dealership around the corner from the office and look at the used car inventory. When the salesman asked what kind of car I was looking for I said that I wasn’t really sure which model and eliminated the colors red, black, white and silver for various reasons. After all that we ended up with blue in the end, which happens to be my favorite color.

After looking around the lot for a little while we came across a 2007 335i that had been used as a loaner car for the dealership. I wasn’t too sure about the car at that point so I decided we would take it for a test drive. The salesman told me to pop it in to sport and have a little fun. I did and whoa, was it zippy. On that test drive I found out that, that little car was really a beast waiting to be unleashed. I fell in love with the car and decided that it was going to be my next driving machine.

The best part of the whole deal was that it was a Certified Pre-Owned received an 8-year/100,000 mile warranty on the car. Additionally I got the standard 4-year/50,000 mile ‘Ultimate Service’ which covers all standard service costs, minus any standard ware and tare items (e.g. tires).

All-in-all I saved money off retail price on the car, got a free extended warranty and all of my service is completely covered. I have to say, for my first car purchase I think I made out better than the dealership.

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!