We promised you that as soon as the Frankfurt Motor Show came to an end, we would write a post listing all the changes made on Carscoop the past few weeks, and well, here we are. The last time we updated our site was in April 2008 when we replaced the HTML template with a newer XML version. Now, instead of redesigning and updating the site all at once, we decided to slowly refresh and incorporate the new features changing or tweaking them as we go. This means that we're far from done yet.Before we list the upgrades, allow me to say that many claim Blogger's platform has serious limitations, is much less SEO friendly, draws less attention from advertisers and is far more difficult to work with than Wordpress and we'd agree 100 percent.
But if anything else, despite all the blogger cons, it's worth mentioning that Carscoop has managed to achieve a respectful ranking of 21,485 on Alexa, 4,589 on Technorati and a 5PR on Google. Not saying that we're even close to the segment leaders in terms of traffic, but not bad overall for a blog that began and still is treated as a 'home-made' product.
But enough with that. Let's sum up the changes that have been made on Carscoop these past weeks:
-a wider format with larger photos for the homepage and individual posts
- smaller summaries and thumbnail pics for the archived and categorized posts (e.g. Frankfurt Motor Show -->)
-the addition of a new section with eight rotating stories at the top of the page, right under the navigation bar
-a zoom function for the photo galleries where the pictures open in the same page but more importantly, are automatically re-sized according to the width / height of your browser screen without affecting the original download quality / pixel size. As we've mentioned before, if you like, you can still open the photos individually on a new tab.
-the ability to have a profile aviator for comments - currently, only for those with an account on Blogger and Google (the limitations we talked about...)
-a new 'Related Posts' feature that now incorporates teaser photos of the articles
-a redesigned 'Carscoop' logo plus several cosmetic/color/size tweaks that include but are not limited to the navigation bar, the comment section and the bars on the right-hand side of the page
-quite possibly something we forgot to mention ;-)
We'd like to hear your opinion about these changes and if you have any ideas on how to better Carscoop, feel free to leave your suggestion(s) in the comment section below.
John
