It’s nice to see a new design for the SFE site - and it looks good too!
Now for the bug reports!
The first issue I’ve run across is how the navigation bar at the top is done - all links for some reason are in JavaScript onClick events with the actual href being just #. This means that you cannot middle-click a button in FireFox to open it in a new tab (it also means you cannot mouse-over a button to see where it leads to - which is a definite no-no in web design/usibility). Looking at the HTML, I cannot see any reason why it’s been done this way, so it should work just fine as ‘standard’ links…
Second issue (minor) - there’s a typo in the tooltip for the RSS Feeds (woohoo!!!) at the top-right of the main page. It reads “RSS Fees”. Charging money for RSS feeds now??
On the old site, the “Hot air rework station with soldering iron” had a note saying that it was out of stock currently, however on the new site there is no such note. Has new stock arrived, or is this a feature that the new site is missing (I’ve been waiting for it to be restocked)?
Another minor one - Every page is titled “Spark Fun”, with no further information on what’s actually being viewed. Makes it hard to find a certain product when you’ve got a dozen windows/tabs open.
Ohhh, I knew logging into the forum was going to hurt. 93 new posts to look at…
Excellect idea starting a bug thread. This is exactly what I needed.
The RSS feed bugs will be sorted out tomorrow. I’m passing off the thread topic to the Varien developer.
I’ll try to get Varien to link the product category or item to the page name so the tabs look better.
Not sure about the cart time-out. I’ll try to get it extended to two days.
The hot-air rework stations with irons are out of stock. Inventory has been updated, not you can’t buy it. I believe we will only list things out of stock if the lead time is significant. Our normal stock items move in and out quickly. This particular rework station is due a few weeks. The shipping from china was 12 weeks on the last order!!
We are still experiencing so odd things with the cart cookies and SSL keys. Please let me know if you run into any problems akin to:
I’ve got 5 things in my cart
I log in
My cart is empty
This is a killer but we think we have it beaten. Let me know if you find out otherwise.
We are really happy to have stuff up and (mostly) running finally!
This isn’t so much a bug as a look-and-feel preference statement.
I’m a loyal follower of sparkfun and buy way too much of your stuff and use your PCB service on a regular basis. I check your site almost daily for updates too! Isn’t that sad?!
I LOVED the bigger pictures on the old site. It makes drooling over stuff much easier and more fun
I was sad to see all the items are now in thumbnail format, and what’s more they’re so small it’s hard to even see what some items are! IMHO as a browsing customer I want to stick around and look at more stuff (and buy more stuff!) when there are nice big pretty pictures on the product pages I know bandwidth isn’t free, but if you could at least bump up the thumbnail size it would be nice because as of right now it’s almost painful to try to make out what’s in those pictures. :?
rackley: Clicking on the small thumbnail sets it as the big thumbnail. Clicking on the big thumbnail will open a new window with a huge picture, as it was before.
I too thought that the huge photos were removed until I clicked around for a bit. The “Click to Enlarge” doesn’t make it obvious that the big picture is still not the largest available - perhaps it needs a little magnifying glass in the bottom-right corner to let you know that you can still click for the larger version?
Okay - this makes me smile and gives me a heart attack at the same time.
YES! The pictures are still there!
We are big picture junkies. 600x600 is now the standard large format. 250x250 is the main pic size, and 69x69 is the thumb. I am slightly worried that more than one person was ‘upset’ to see the big pictures go. Don’t worry, the pics are there and they’re bigger than ever. Just click on the main image to open another window with the big picture. Any ideas on how to make this more apparent? Maybe just more than 48hrs of new? (once the new car smell dissapates a bit)
We hope this thumb->main->large system will ease some of the loading times. Who has dialup these days anyway :shock: ?
USPS shipping is back online for domestic. A couple typos ironed out. RSS is still being beat on.
Oh yes, I know that the larger images are still there when you click on them. That’s a “duh” thing and if people don’t know that they shouldn’t be allowed near a web browser I don’t think you have to worry about that Sparky. What I meant is I like having the medium sized pics as the thumbnail pics. Know what I mean? It just makes it more fun to browse stuff!
Ahh - I see now. You’re right, the 69x69 is devilishly small. Hopefully the small image will be just tempting enough you will open the larger screen.
I wonder if I can get Varien to give the customer an option to select between the 69pix preview and the 250pix preview…
Oh, and if anyone has been following the BatchPCB stuff, the same Global Express Document shipping bug poked it’s head on the SFE checkout process as well. It’s really nice when a bug comes along that has been seen and exterminated before. The SFE international shipping module now behaves.
sparky:
We are still experiencing so odd things with the cart cookies and SSL keys. Please let me know if you run into any problems akin to:
I’ve got 5 things in my cart
I log in
My cart is empty
I can do better than that.
I’ve got a thing in my cart
I do more shopping and put another thing in my cart.
My cart now only contains the last thing.
All of this is without logging in.
I allow cookies to be set by www.sparkfun.com. Actually, I was allowing them from everywhere (since fixed) when I discovered the problem. The old site does not give me this problem.
The new site seems to load very slowly for me. There’s a 1-4 second delay between clicking on a link and when it starts to download the page. The old site doesnt exhibit this behavior, neither do the forums. Tried firefox/opera and (for comparison) IE. I’ve got a pretty fat pipe on this end, not sure what else I can tell you, except that the pause is slow enough to be rather annoying. Makes it that much harder not to miss the old site.
Looking at the HTML, I cannot see any reason why it’s been done this way, so it should work just fine as ‘standard’ links…
