Until this afternoon I found that the home page was very good and satisfactory, however it seems that the Airliners.net team has just performed an update changing the layout. I must admit that the new way to display pictures when searching for them is much better with 2 rows of pictures instead of 1, however I really dislike the new homepage layout and don't find it user friendly at all. When I go to the home page of a website like this one, I would enjoy seeing the top pictures and most active threads in a quick glimps however with the new layout I need to scroll continuously down the page to find the information I'm searching. Please oh please go back to the old page layout for the home page!

Hi

We released an upgrade today and it appears that there is a display issue on the homepage especially for medium sized screens. The developers are aware of the issue and we hope to have it resolved shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience..

Paul

I think in general, even before the latest update, font sizes are significantly too big. I have to zoom out (3x Strg-MINUS) in order to see everything properly on a 15 inch notebook screen.

PeterB wrote:

I think in general, even before the latest update, font sizes are significantly too big. I have to zoom out (3x Strg-MINUS) in order to see everything properly on a 15 inch notebook screen.

I don't know what your settings are, but until the last update I could see all that I needed in a glimpse on my 13 inch MacBook Pro.

With the default zoom settings (just press cmd + 0) it is a scrolling nirvana on my 15inch MacBook Pro as the font and images sizes are way too big.
I have to zoom out three times to have a proper overview. But then half of the screen is not really used (the sides are just blue empty space).

Yep.. it seems like things can get worse when you think they can't.

This is what I get every day on my PC. Resolution is 1280x1024.

teme82 wrote:

This is what I get every day on my PC. Resolution is 1280x1024.

Seems like the whole main page design is based on the incorrect assumption that all desktop users only ever want to use a website in maximised windows on huge monitors.

But what truly boggles my mind is that the developers seem to think that a view like that is actually what mobile users want. What on earth makes them think that mobile users will want such vast amounts of wasted space?

speedbored wrote:

teme82 wrote:

This is what I get every day on my PC. Resolution is 1280x1024.

Seems like the whole main page design is based on the incorrect assumption that all desktop users only ever want to use a website in maximised windows on huge monitors.

But what truly boggles my mind is that the developers seem to think that a view like that is actually what mobile users want. What on earth makes them think that mobile users will want such vast amounts of wasted space?

Forgot to mention that the images are heavily blurred. I hope they will fix this issue soon.

teme82 wrote:

Forgot to mention that the images are heavily blurred. I hope they will fix this issue soon.

Yes.

That seems to be because someone appears to have decided that, on the homepage, it is more sensible to scale all of the images up from the smallest size that is used, rather than scaling them down from the largest size that is used.

All of it smacks of someone very very inexperienced doing the decision making.

I can't believe this is still a problem almost two weeks later. When is this going to be fixed? I'm seriously thinking of leaving this site and taking my photos with me. I don't know if I was to lend my photos to a site that is this poorly designed and run. Get with it, A.net!

DLX737200 wrote:

I can't believe this is still a problem almost two weeks later.

Terrible amateurish design and poor quality of pictures on front page are known issue since restart of "New improved site". I just think owners are happy with it.

I don't think anyone cares. Why?? Maybe they (the owners, not the volunteers) have decided the site will NEVER be profitable and they are abandoning it.

airkas1 wrote:

I've been told that it's holiday time in the US, and one of the developers that we were in contact most is currently away. Once he returns (next week?) I hope we can make some visible progress again. Sorry it's taking so long.

I wrote the above earlier this morning, but have received an E-mail just now that they're still looking into this (and not per se waiting for next week). So it will be fixed, but I don't have an exact ETA.

ezola wrote:

I don't think anyone cares. Why?? Maybe they (the owners, not the volunteers) have decided the site will NEVER be profitable and they are abandoning it.

Thanks for your negativity and false-rumor spreading again. They do care and are not abandoning it. As a matter of fact, the general manager has mentioned that traffic and views are up.

airkas1 wrote:

As a matter of fact, the general manager has mentioned that traffic and views are up.

It would be interesting to know by what measure the general manager has come to that conclusion.

If they are using page views as a measure then, given that users now have to go via at least twice as many pages as before to do anything, even a 90% increase in page views could actually mean that there are fewer real people using the site. A 20% increase would probably approximate to half as many people.

Or maybe they are counting logins. By that measure, I am personally visiting the site at least 100 times as much as before

IMO, forum posting appears, very definitely, to be way down on pre-upgrade, and photo view counts also seem to be way down. So I would actually be very surprised indeed if said general manager is not being very selective on the statistics used to prove that traffic and views are "up". "Covering arse for the upgrade fiasco" certainly is what springs to my mind.

Apologies for the negativity but it's very hard to be positive when the rate of progress on getting the site back to even close to what it was before is glacial, especially when each release of "fixes" seems to break almost as much as it fixes.

^ No idea by what measure. But I agree views and posts are down.

airkas1 wrote:

I wrote the above earlier this morning, but have received an E-mail just now that they're still looking into this (and not per se waiting for next week). So it will be fixed, but I don't have an exact ETA.

Kas, while not wanting to be negative, one does have to question how serious DM are about the site when the home page (which was getting close to being right) has now been broken for two weeks for non-mobile device users. It simply creates such a bad impression of the site for visitors - not only is the layout awful, the quality of the displayed images is appalling.

I fully understand Steve. I agree the home page/mobile switch has been broken for too long now. It should be a simple fix as I understand. We've mentioned this loads of times already and it's quite annoying that it's not solved yet.

airkas1 wrote:

I fully understand Steve. I agree the home page/mobile switch has been broken for too long now. It should be a simple fix as I understand. We've mentioned this loads of times already and it's quite annoying that it's not solved yet.

Which brings out two possibilities: either developers are not suitable qualified for site maintenance or site was redesigned from "too old to maintain" into "too poorly designed and written to work". Both coupled with "general manager reported that traffic is up and rising" makes picture even more bright and shining of "the best aviation site of the world" future

airkas1 wrote:

I fully understand Steve. I agree the home page/mobile switch has been broken for too long now. It should be a simple fix as I understand. We've mentioned this loads of times already and it's quite annoying that it's not solved yet.

I hope the fix will solve the all the issues. I use unusual screen aspect 5:4 on my PC with 1280x1024 resolution.

Hi All

A fix has been released and you should no longer encounter the issue if you have any more problems please let us know. Thanks for your patience while this was worked on.

Regards

Paul