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What has changed on the new-look Head for Points?

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Yesterday afternoon we unveiled our new look.  We hope you like it.

If you see any technical issues (broken links, formatting issues etc) then please post them in this ‘noise free’ thread.  We can hopefully get a quick fix in place.

For more general comments or ideas for improvements we could make in the medium term, please post them under this article you’re reading now.

In this article, I want to do a quick run-through of site elements which have changed.  This list is purely about functionality – I think the changes to image sizes, font sizes etc are obvious!

As I said in our launch article yesterday, there are no plans to change the ‘three articles per day, published by 6am’ model although this has always been somewhat flexible.

Site search – The search function is now at the top of the page.  We have upgraded the search function behind the scenes with some new software.  The quality of results should improve.

Comments – We have removed images (gravatars) from comments.  Only a small percentage of readers used them and, technically, it was a drag on the site as the images are fetched remotely every time a page is loaded.  This required over 1 million ‘calls’ per month to the Gravatar website.

Comments – Comments should look a lot better on mobile phones, because the indentation is more modest and third and fourth level comments are no longer squeezed up.

Email list – Alongside our daily emails, which send each article in full to your inbox, we have launched a new Saturday summary email.  You can subscribe by clicking the ‘Subscribe’ box at the top of the page.  This will contain links to all the articles published during the previous week.  It will hopefully appeal to people for whom daily emails were simply too much information.  The weekly summary will also run as an article on the site on Saturday mornings.

Sidebar – If you read the site on desktop, we have dropped a few things from the sidebar.  ‘Recent Comments’ has gone, as has the ability to pull up all articles from a particular month, as has the ‘Corrections’ page.  None of these were heavily used.

Amazon link – The Amazon link, and other affiliate links which were in the sidebar, have gone.  If you’d still like to support us by using our Amazon link, you can find it by clicking the link in the affiliate disclaimer at the top of every article.  Recent cuts to the commission rates paid by Amazon meant that this link no longer justified the space taken.

Ads – We have reduced the number of ads across the site.  The heavily reduced revenue from advertising at the moment means that the trade off between distraction, site speed and money is not currently worth it.

Menu options – We have changed the contents of the menu bar at the top of the page.  Most of the old pages still exist:

‘About’ is now in the very top right on desktop

‘Contact’ has been renamed ‘Media & Advertising’ and is now in the very top right on desktop

‘New to Avios?’ is now under the ‘Avios’ tab and has been renamed ‘The beginner’s guide to collecting Avios’

‘Quick Avios’ is now under the ‘Avios’ tab as ‘Top Avios earning offers (August 2020)’

‘Hotel Promos’ is now under the ‘Hotel Offers’ tab as ‘Top hotel points earning offers (August 2020)’

‘Booking’ is now under the ‘Hotel Offers’ tab as ‘Get exclusive benefits on luxury hotel bookings via HfP’

‘August Credit Cards Update’ is now under the ‘Credit Cards’ tab as ‘Top credit card offers (August 2020)’

‘Favourites’ has been split up.  If you click on the ‘Reviews’ tab you will see separate pages for our flight reviews, hotel reviews, credit card reviews and airport lounge reviews.  The credit card articles on the old ‘Favourites’ page are now under the ‘Credit Cards’ tab.

One bit of feedback we had yesterday is that people were missing the ‘next post / previous post’ navigation.  The ‘Today’s Top Stories’ box replaces this (and is far more useful for anyone visiting from Google who used to land on an old article with irrelevant ‘Next / Previous’ links) but we will see what we can do.

We are also thinking about ways of tweaking the comments layout to separate individual comments more clearly and highlight staff replies.  Let us know if you have any thoughts.

I think this is everything.  If I’ve missed anything out, please ask in the comments below.  Thank you for your continued support.

Category

General

Comments (112)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Keith says:
    19 Aug19 August 06:55

    I was searching for a recent IHG related article, but by searching for ‘IHG’ it would have been useful to be able to search/order the results by most recent as a lot of older articles about previous accelerate promotions appeared at the top of the search
    Thanks!

    • Rob says:
      19 Aug19 August 08:29

      You can, however, pull up IHG in the ‘Categories’ box on the right sidebar which WILL bring up everything in date order.

      • MD says:
        19 Aug19 August 08:54

        Interesting. I’ve just tried to replicate this generic IHG search on mobile (android, chrome) out of interest, but there doesn’t seem to be a categories button. And no right sidebar? All I can see is IHG news articles on apparently random order, the first from 2015. Not terribly useful. Apologies if I’m being blind, but how would I sort the search entries in this case? Many thanks.

        • Rob says:
          19 Aug19 August 10:41

          Yes, no ‘Categories’ box on mobile.

          I also have some frustrations with the search function because, as you say, it doesn’t give enought ‘weight’ to publication date. There is judgement in this – if you search ‘Hilton status match’, should a 2019 article with that exact title be listed before a 2020 article which has those words in it? Should the proximity of the words in the 2020 article also be an influence?

          I CAN change the listing setting from ‘relevance’ to ‘date’ but that is too extreme. For example, if I do that and search for ‘Hilton status match’, this thread is on top because I just used those words in this comment.

          We can only ‘weight’ the following variables: title, article content, article comments, article category. For example, if we overweight ‘category’ then a mention of ‘Hilton status match’ in an IHG article would rank lower. At present, the weighting is dominated by article title.

          EDIT: It turns out we CAN change the code in the search software to increase the weighting given to date. Leave it with us.

          • MD says:
            19 Aug19 August 11:30

            Thanks Rob. Good to hear. There’s bound to be a sweet spot between date and relevance somewhere.

  • Nodrog says:
    19 Aug19 August 07:02

    Viewing on iPad, some of the images on the home Do not fit properly in the image boxes. For example the BA and nutmeg articles today

  • Wollhouse says:
    19 Aug19 August 07:15

    I really value the wealth of knowledge in the daily chat threads. So, for me, there would be value in ensuring that this section was pinned so that the current day’s chat always appeared as a “top story” in your new block

  • BJ says:
    19 Aug19 August 07:26

    If you look at the .HFP in ROB BURGESS.HFP it really stands out because it is upper case bold. Same with REPLY at the end of each comment which is the most readily apparent visual separating comments. I think that feels a bit odd because it should be the name of those commenting that needs to jump out, not REPLY. Thus, my suggestion:
    1. Cont names in upper case bold.
    2. Rob and Rhys upper case bold in red if possible.
    3. REPLY upper case italic not bold.

    • Rob says:
      19 Aug19 August 08:28

      Making REPLY smaller is already on the list. We are looking at ways of highlighting our contributions – one option is to have the grey bar alongside the quote appear in a different colour.

      What IS a pain, which we didn’t realise, is that only the article author gets ‘HFP’ next to their comment. If Rhys comments on an article which is attributed to me he doesn’t get it.

      • BJ says:
        19 Aug19 August 10:56

        That would help but I still think it would be better if we can see at a glance where one comment ends and the next begins and who is making them. Simplest way to do that would be to put all names upper case bold. That is not to say I cannot live with it as it stands, I can, I find it ok but I think it could be better. Sonetimes we rapidly scroll comments to respond to replies to our own, or to see latest discussion around somebody else’s comment we found interesting earlier. This would also be easier if all names were upper case bold. With respect to the issue with your name and Rhys. This is not ideal I know but you could perhaps get round it by attributing all articles to both of you (or Anika or Carolihe) with the first name given being the lead author? I am guessing you and Rhys run most, if not all, articles past each other for comment & revision prior to publication anyway.

  • Marcelo C says:
    19 Aug19 August 07:39

    Any plans to allow me to receive a notification if I get a reply to my comment?

  • Lesley says:
    19 Aug19 August 07:57

    I commented earlier but it’s still not appeared.

    • Jon says:
      19 Aug19 August 11:08

      I had similar just now – I submitted a comment (technically a reply to a comment, in case that makes any difference) and the page refreshed, but my comment was nowhere to be found. Navigating away then returning and refreshing the page made it appear, so the comment had been posted, just wasn’t immediately visible to me. Possibly a browser caching issue, maybe.

  • TripRep says:
    19 Aug19 August 08:10

    Nice update Rob

    The HfP logo is v familiar font

    Especially the lower case f

    No concerns from Mr Zuckerberg or is that why it’s extended?

  • James says:
    19 Aug19 August 08:20

    I like a new format I saw the email change at 5 this morning.

    I would like a tab for Amex this is the main site I look at for amex info

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

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