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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 (113)

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

  • Team Plat says:
    19 Aug19 August 14:40

    Rob, with regards to the article width on desktop some others have mentioned:
    Does the “sticky-sidebar-container” really need to be sticky? If the contents of it were moved to a single row underneath the article title (like before), that would give you extra width to play with. You could potentially put the share buttons at the bottom of the article since people would be more likely to share an article once they’ve read it.

    Unless you’ve found that the readers do benefit from information such as date, number of comments, category and share buttons when halfway down an article. In that case, ignore the above!

    • Rhys says:
      19 Aug19 August 14:53

      We don’t want to go to wide on text because otherwise you get tennis match syndrome! It’s a bit like reading Wikipedia on full width – not amazing!

      We haven’t used it much yet but the sticky sidebar is really for when we have a post Contents. Then you’ll be able to click between different parts of the article or different articles in the same series. Take a look at our top credit card offers page.

      • Team Plat says:
        19 Aug19 August 15:48

        You could never get to wikipedia levels, but I get what you mean!

        In my opinion, the current (486px for me on a 1280px screen) article width creates even more of a tennis match back-and-forth effect. I used wayback machine to compare an article from April on the old and new layouts and the older one is less back-and-forthy(!) and easier to read.

        Many of the top world blogs/websites use articles in the 600-640px width range. I think stepping up to 540px would work well on HfP. I understand the theme is using flex to calculate width but I’m hoping the values provide better insight.

        The sticky sidebar with the links as on the credit card offers page is very powerful indeed. It works well there since it’s a unique page in itself. In terms of your daily articles though, is that level of functionality really needed?

        Hope the feedback’s useful either way!

        • Rob says:
          19 Aug19 August 17:29

          Not many 1280px screens around these days though. I use it on a 3840px 15 inch laptop which is relatively standard now. A 13 inch would be 1920px.

          The old site was ideal for you BUT when you saw it on a 3840 screen there were huge amounts of blue space down both sides.

    • Rob says:
      19 Aug19 August 17:31

      We don’t like extra width. The issue, actually, is what you do with the space when you DON’T use the width.

      Because the font is bigger (fatter and taller) than it was, you get roughly the same number of words per line as you used to. We used to flick it back and forth between old and new for comparison.

      • Team Plat says:
        19 Aug19 August 18:49

        That’s a good point you make about screen resolutions. Anyhow on my old 1280px screen I’m definitely seeing fewer words per line than before :/
        Perhaps some of the other commenters who raised a similar width issue are using lower resolution screens and it’s time for us all to upgrade!

        • Peter K says:
          19 Aug19 August 20:03

          That’s interesting. I’ve increased my mobile screen resolution (I typically use a lower resolution to reduce battery usage) and the whole thing does look a lot better!
          I would never have thought of that.

  • Paul Anderson says:
    19 Aug19 August 15:44

    Loving the new site. Only comment I’d make is around the search. I searched for hotels.com, and the results come back I guess in relevance order. I was looking for the most recent article on them but there was no easy way to find that. It returned a post from Feb 2019, then May 2019, then Feb 2018, then Feb 2019, then Aug 2017, then the article from May 2020. Not sure if you can sort by ‘posted date’ order? Cheers, Paul.

  • Dominic says:
    19 Aug19 August 15:53

    How do I now find your reviews of BA aircraft best seating by aircraft type? Thanks

  • H says:
    19 Aug19 August 16:25

    I would prefer to see all comments on one page instead clicking through the numbered comment pages.

  • Mark says:
    19 Aug19 August 18:43

    My only thought is that reading it on a tablet in landscape means that 1/3 of the screen (right hand side) is given up to adverts or white space

  • Will says:
    19 Aug19 August 18:51

    I miss the old logo.

  • Charlieface says:
    19 Aug19 August 20:20

    Maybe a border around each comment and slightly more spacing would make it more obvious.
    Personal feeling is the font size is also a bit big, maybe that’s just me. The nutmeg logo does look a bit idiotic in that position.

  • Dan says:
    19 Aug19 August 20:34

    One piece of feedback on comments would be email alerting for when a comment you’ve made has been replied to.

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

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