So some of you may have noticed a few changes we have been gradually making to the website over the last 5 weeks. And we wanted to update our visitors and fans as to why. The website had been in need of an upgrade for some time and we finally found some time to start working on it. We will add some of the changes to our changelog in our about section for those of you looking for more details.
Over the past few years running the website we pooled ideas and gathered feedback from a lot of loyal visitors here to make these improvements. We are gradually rolling out some of these changes (a new page layout) to our Canadian Online Store pages, we anticipate this to take around 2 months. Older pages in our blog etc may not be updated, as we have over 3,000 pages on the website it would just take too long, so we made an educated decision to just change that one category which is the most popular section of the website and pages that we update daily anyway. Here is a snapshot of some of the things we have changed and a short synopsis of what we were hoping to achieve;
- Logo: Our logo was old, in fact it was done by a friend of ours when we first launched the site and we wanted something that would truly represent Canada, coupons and what we do. We hope you like it.
- Navigation: We updated the nav bar from a black and blue bar to a nice blue ribbon, we also added a top navigation including some interesting pages and gave it all a funky fresh feeling, a little more web 2.0 we hope.
- Ratings: We added a nice ratings feature, due to overwhelming feedback from users, in order to rate stores, in the attempt to be a resource and a community for all coupon hunters and online shoppers. We like the result, it enables visitors to see at a snapshot how trustworthy a store is and the likelihood that their shopping experience is a positive one. In other words it helps to set peoples shopping expectations. The comments section also provides visitors to elaborate on their experiences to educate other people and for use in analysis.
- Coupon Voting: One of the toughest parts about running one of the most popular coupon sites in Canada is that updating coupons and investigating expiry dates is extremely challenging. With this new voting feature visitors can rate on how successful a coupon was and thus inform other users, giving people an idea of the likelihood the coupon will work or not. Remember this tool is only as powerful as the uses willingness to come back to VoucherCodes.ca to inform everyone if the discount worked or not. So please help out here to make this community be as optimal and accurate as possible
- Submit a code: Our inbox usually get’s some new codes from visitors every day. But we need help, if you see a code on another site or get emailed an offer, or spot one on their website or on facebook then please come back and submit it to us so we can add it. We will credit you as the source for some personal Kudos.
- Coupons: We changed the look, feel and functionality of the coupons, to make it more graphically pleasing as well as more functional and faster to get the coupons everyone is searching for. Blue is for coupon and green is for deal. It’s handy as depending on the offer a new shopping window will open when customers reveal the code or deal, making shopping faster and applying deals automatically in some cases.
- Tooltips: We added some hover state tooltips for visitors to get an instant snapshot of whats inside, try it yourself; hover over a-z or categories in the menu bar and see what you think, we did it to speed up the search for stores and discounts
- Social: We wanted people to be able to share codes and discounts more easily so we have added some dynamic social buttons from some of the most popular social sharing sites like facebook, twitter and google buzz. Please feel free to use them whenever you would like to share something with a friend.
We hope you like the changes and your feedback is most welcome. We still have some changes to make in this round of development but nothing major for a while. If you spot any errors or graphical anomalies please send us an email or make a comment here and we will look right into it. All these changes did come with a small price; the website is slightly slower than before, the scripts and coding and functionality take a little longer to load, especially in older browsers, so we encourage users to upgrade to the latest browsers. We have found google chrome, internet explorer 9 and firefox 4 to be the fastest out there right now.
the vouchercodes team