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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.

  • ThinkSquare says:
    19 Aug19 August 09:13

    Please can we have an option to sort search results by date (newest first)? Also, I’d prefer the comments to start at the oldest first.

    • Bagoly says:
      19 Aug19 August 09:30

      Definitely agree about ability to order search results in descending date order.

      Interestingly enough, I tried “ICC” for the Amex International Currency Card.
      What I got back was lots on cricket!
      Now, there is a genuine clash of acronyms there, but it would be good to think of some solution.
      One possibility would be to say that in the context of this site, “ICC” is for International Currency Card, and any other use of ICC gets expanded or amended.
      Another would be to mark articles at the time as “continuing” or “time-limited” and have the former prioritised in the search.
      Or indeed have an expiry date on each article, with the search results putting unexpired articles first. E.g. if writing today about a sporting competition, put the day after the whole thing finishes (or a month later) as the expiry date. For offers, that’s even easier.

      • Bagoly says:
        19 Aug19 August 09:32

        “descending date order” – I meant “most recent first”.
        Ah, that missing ability to edit comments 🙂

    • Rob says:
      19 Aug19 August 10:34

      The developer said it was too hard. We disagree, so we are going to get someone else to look at it. It CAN’T be hard, because as you see from the chat thread, you can re-order them with a single click.

  • R says:
    19 Aug19 August 09:49

    Strongly agree with the attempts to get the next and previous article buttons back on the bottom of each article they are incredibly useful when reading through all 3 of the days articles at 9:01am

    • Peter K says:
      19 Aug19 August 10:31

      Yes! I’ve had to go to the home screen several times to navigate on mobile today and it is a bit tedious.

  • ADS says:
    19 Aug19 August 11:07

    Has the number of comments in each page been reduced ?

    Currently 4 pages for 52 comments – that feels more pages than before ?

    • Rob says:
      19 Aug19 August 11:08

      No. The comments show eight FIRST LEVEL comments. When people are discussing with each other, which is what normally happens, you get 20 or so per page. Today, people are not having a discussion so every comment is a first level comment, so you may get as few as 8.

      It will normalise tomorrow as people go back to commenting as they always did.

      • TGLoyalty says:
        19 Aug19 August 11:24

        Not sure if its 8 for a reason but I honestly thing it could be extended as people lose interest with having so many pages.

        I don’t feel that’s just my opinion as many have commented that there seem to be numerous pages

        • Dominic says:
          19 Aug19 August 13:28

          Agree – would be useful to have something like on FT (the flight forum, not the newspaper) whereby the next page automatically loads as more comments. Find myself reading much more as a result of that.

      • ADS says:
        19 Aug19 August 11:57

        Ah. Didn’t realise that was how it worked.

      • ChrisBCN says:
        19 Aug19 August 13:13

        I’m still not convinced that there were only 8 top level comments before! I wonder if there was a ‘feature’ on mobile or some browsers where there were more

  • Stuart says:
    19 Aug19 August 11:11

    Whilst the new HfP logo looks on trend its a shame old logo at the top of the page is gone as it was something interesting and novel

  • Mark LLL says:
    19 Aug19 August 11:28

    Overall I find the new-look HfP Webpages a good improvement in presentation.

    It is the content that keeps me returning to your site.
    By content I mean both articles and the often useful replies.

    The HfP articles that give me the most pleasure to read are those that explain how to gain advantage in a travel businesses’ loyalty points scheme by the judicious use of some irregular, perhaps counter-intuitive tactic.
    I won’t have the opportunity to use many of these tips but that does not diminish the fun for me.

  • @mkcol says:
    19 Aug19 August 12:01

    I feel like the site name on the home page is understated, given it appears almost the same size as the Nutmeg ad.

    • Rob says:
      19 Aug19 August 13:27

      We had long discussions about this. My view was that it doesn’t add anything and just gets in the way. The opposing view was that we’re not famous enough to get away with this (as, say, The Economist does).

      If the logo was bigger, the Nutmeg ad would be bigger though AND the white space between them would increase too.

  • Dominic says:
    19 Aug19 August 13:30

    I realise adverts are targeted, but I note one of the Google ads I am receiving is “ba betrayal dot com”; given partnerships with BA, is this something that you want showing as an ad?

    Realise the editorial on here has been a fair reflection, but seems a bit swayed to be advertising something so strongly anti-BA.

    • Rob says:
      19 Aug19 August 14:09

      Google runs this ad, not us. We could block it but that’s not very free speech.

    • Doug M says:
      19 Aug19 August 14:35

      Not sure BA Betrayal are as anti-BA as much of the readership here.

  • Paul says:
    19 Aug19 August 14:25

    The advert (currently one for nutmeg) at the top of every page on mobile web is very distracting. It’s a large square add which takes up over half the page before you get to the top of the article.

    Other than that I like the new look

    • Rob says:
      19 Aug19 August 17:32

      It was always there!

      It is a weird function of the human brain that 3 people have now said this even though there was an INDENTICALLY sized ad on the old site, in the same place 🙂

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

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