HC Blog

and as I said back then in this post, it’s “out with the old, in with the new”!

This time, we’re going from this:

to this:

and again, we can thank the lovely Andrea, of Wanted Web Designs for her collaboration in bringing this new design to life!

This redesign is almost entirely visual — the overall layout and navigation of the site is basically identical. You do now have the advantage of a nice drop-down menu at the top. You may find pages of the site you never new existed before!

*NOTE* if you prefer to view the site 800 px wide rather than 1000, you can use the link at the bottom left of the page (under the copyright info) to do so. And if you preferred the old layout, click “Classic” to be taken back to it

The main difference you’ll notice is the Featured Shops listing area, which appears on all the main shopping pages (index, calendar, category, spots, search). Everything you’ll want to know about this new feature is explained here. In a nutshell, the cost is $5 per day to be one of at most 20 listings. So you’re guaranteed at least 25% exposure time, but more if the 20 listing slots are not filled.

You’ll also notice that the banner ads that used to be at the top of the calendar are now gone. I believe this is the right choice for this design. For those of you who had an active banner listing at the top of the calendar, you have several choices:

• If you paid using HC$. You can move your listing to a different slot (bottom of calendar, top or bottom of Spots’ Corner, top or bottom of the forums)
• If you paid using Paypal, you can either move your listing as mentioned above, or forward your PP receipt to hyenacart at gmail.com and I will refund a prorated amount to you (e.g, if you had 15 days left on your banner as of 8/31/08, I’ll refund $5).

To request a move to a different slot, please log in to Banner Manage, click on your ad, and make note of the number at the end of the url link. It ends with Banners:Settings:xxxx where the xxxx is a 4 digit number. Email me the 4 digit number, and which slot you would like your banner moved to at hyenacart at gmail.com. If I don’t hear from you by Thursday 9/4, 9 pm, I will automatically move your banner to the bottom calendar spot.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the new design. Remember, you can leave comments on this blog

Oh, and one other thing: now that we have info pages for both HCS and HCM, could you please delete all listings that contain policy, shipping, about me information and move it to informational pages? It is confusing for shoppers to see informational listings mixed in with product listings when they do searches or view the daily calendar. Thanks! If you see a seller with informational listings, feel free to use the ‘contact seller’ link and let them know to make this switch. You can link them to this blog entry

Thanks everyone! I hope you enjoy the new design. If you notice any pages that don’t look right, or are acting strange, please leave a comment here or send an email to support at hyenacart.com. Oh, and just so you know, I’ll be changing the colors on this blog as well as the forums to match our new site

Have a great Labor Day!!

OK — I found some great articles this weekend on optimizing servers and code, so I’ve been doing some fiddling.

The main thing you’ll notice is that if there are over 100 shopper in a store, the number of shoppers simply reads “100+” now. I think the server was spending too much brain power counting shoppers, so I’ve changed it so that if there are more than 100 people in a store, the server stops counting people and starts concentrating on the stocking. I am really hopeful that this will help resolve some of our crashing issues. In fact, I’d like to put it to a test. If one of you uber-hyenas would like to help test this out, please email me at hyenacart at gmail.com. We’ll pick a fairly obscure time to test, where, if we do crash, not as many people will be inconvenienced. Let me know if you want to help out!

I made a few other changes, so I’m hoping you find that HC is loading faster and acting zippier than it has been. I’ve turned the comments feature on this blog back on, so feel free to respond via comments and let me know if you notice any differences. Also, if anything is acting funky, please email support at hyenacart.com to open a helpdesk ticket.

Thanks everyone!