New site announcement

[tomoswald]

Firstly apologies for the length of this post, but I feel it is important to give you as much detail as possible on the update of the new ClickaSnap site that we have been developing.

Secondly the bad news, after spending in excess of £500k with our previous developers over the last 13 months, they have repeatedly failed to deliver as agreed, on the product, service, cost’s and most importantly dates. However, with them constantly dangling the carrot of its only 4 weeks away now, it was difficult to leave and foolishly we stood by them. This has now come to an end as we owe it to ourselves and most importantly you, our loyal customers to take positive action. And just so you know we aren’t going to let them get away with their actions we have employed Taylor Wessing London’s top Tech lawyers to take the relevant action against them.

Thirdly the good news, in February we engaged with Blue Frontier, (https://www.bluefrontier.co.uk/) a UK development company with 3 offices and over 100 employees, to start working with us on not only securing the existing ClickaSnap site, making some immediate changes to make it less painful to use over the coming weeks and to complete the spec and wire frames build document for the new site and mobile App.

Following a large number of meetings yesterday we gave the go ahead for Blue Frontier to start the new site and mobile App build. This will take 6 months and we want it to be an interactive process with you our users, so you can have a say in how you want the site to work. Details of how this will work will follow, but your views are important to us to ensure we don’t let you down again, and the finished product is everything you wished for.

I am open for questions so please comment below and I will reply as soon as I can, we will also be compiling a video interview with myself and my team, to talk about the experience of the old developers, but more importantly the exciting changes and new ClickaSnap team members we are now working with.

Once this is all completed, I am personally going to fund a new trust pilot review based website around developers, so that I can help others avoid the painful and costly experience I have had over the last few years.

[dylanburgess]

So basically at least six more months of the current site?

with or without updates or bug fixes?

New store put back till new site?

[tomoswald]

We’ll know more details about what can and can’t be done to the existing site at the end of April once they have completed the code review. We will aim to do as much as possible to the existing site to alleviate the pain we all feel when we use it

It also won’t be at least 6 months, it will be delivered complete in 6 months

[dabhand16]

It also won’t be at least 6 months, it will be delivered complete in 6 months

Wowsers! Fingers crossed.

[margots]

I have been thinking about this for a bit now, and since you explicitely ask for feedback, here are my thoughts:
What I personally found very painful on the existing site over the last few months was the ongoing logout issues. This started exactly when you announced that the login page was being worked on, before there were no problems. It got very painful with time, resulting in me not being able to view the photos of certain users anymore or even visiting certain user profiles. As soon as I clicked on them, I got logged out. Clearing cookies and cache sometimes solved the problem, but not always. For myself I solved the problem by using the Edge browser now, which seems to be the only browser that works with Clickasnap. Logouts happened on Chrome, Firefox and the Android phone. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is affected, so hopefully this info will be helpful for some. However, a website should work on all browsers.
For the future site what I would love to see is a working search. I also see Clickasnap as a huge database of photos, and being able to search for certain things would be very helpful. Currently the search seems to work in a way that if I enter for example yellow rose, it will search for anything yellow and anything rose, so I will get yellow boats and red roses. The ability to search for long tail keywords would be great, or at least the search combining the two words and understanding that what I want to see is yellow roses and not boats. This would also be helpful when tagging the uploaded photos.
My thoughts so far, will think some more

[tomoswald]

Thanks Margots, all of this will be passed onto the new devs

[istewart12]

One thing I would love to see is a database of "liked" photos, or the ability to save them, on our own profiles, much like Instagram has. I'd like to be able to save the photos of other users that I really like and have the ability to look back on them.

[mark2uk]

Thanks for the update Tom. It has been a hard slog but glad to see you have a solution.
I would like to be able to leave comments on user profiles and have a chat area of some kind to share ideas.

[JLowPhotos]

On the new site it would be good if you could only like and comment on a photo when you are actually viewing it rather than being able to do this on the activity feed.

Also to stop any further problems with users misunderstanding the ppv amount how about putting it as '7/10ths of a cent' rather than the current 0.7c.

[belzybob]

On the new site it would be good if you could only like and comment on a photo when you are actually viewing it rather than being able to do this on the activity feed.

Also to stop any further problems with users misunderstanding the ppv amount how about putting it as '7/10ths of a cent' rather than the current 0.7c.

If the poor dears struggle with 0.7c I think it unlikely they would be able to cope with fractions.