Site feedback - what do you think?

You may have noticed that the site structure hasn't changed a great deal in the last few years. We've pretty much stuck with the sections we have since the initial redesign.

We're now looking at improving the way our readers (that's you) can browse the site. Please use the poll to vote on what you think needs improving. Feel free to leave any detailed feedback in this thread and we'll take any constructive criticism and ideas on board.

We have a good idea of what areas on the site need work. You, however, are the users and it's your experience on the site we want to improve so have your say!

 

I can't honestly give you an answer because I only see the site from the forums.

From that perspective the tagging system is still a PITA.

 

An ignore setting would be nice there is a few retards i'd like to add straight away

 

I want a few more forums back. Tagging isn't useful. We deffo need a forum for software and hardware!

(oops sorry, I didn't see that this was site only)

 

And please can we have some more modding articles too!

 

qft

fuzzy, i believe there is an ignore feature. or at least there was i haven't used it in a while

 

Aha just found it, you have to go through the users profile, cheers

 

I voted that I wasn't keen on comments below the news articles - I am wholly in favour of comments on news articles, I just don't like the comments section (this apples too all of the comments sections).

The layout, design and features available in the forums bit of the discussion are much better imo. I also find them easier to read, which is a bit odd I suppose.

 

I love the current structure, don't change a thing!

 

I think being able to filter in to subsections would be good, also a comparison system by score would be useful.

 

Personally, in terms of layout, I only ever visit the front page, articles that I visit from the front page and the forums.
I'm not to keen on the comments section, I'd rather just jump straight into the forum discussion from an article.

 

i like the comments below articles, thats what hooked me into the forums, as i'm not normally a forum type of guy. I'd love to see more on the DS, i loved the homebrew article and the phantom hourglass review. My favourite section is the columns though, i'm glad that they're more frequent now but i'd like more, being greedy and all. Also stuff like laptop reviews would be good, thats one of the strenghs of trustedreviews. And finally, i love in pc format how they do the month in numbers, i think that'd be great on here

 

I must admit, and I'm quite ashamed to say, but I'm not very active on the forum aspect of Bit-Tech which is surprising considering I'm a forum ghoul, however, I'm constantly accessing Bit-Tech. All of you do a fantastic job and I very rarely disagree with some of the opinions/views you have in your columns.

Bit-Tech has to be the best hardware enthusiast website I know of, I find myself constantly linking to your articles in forums posts I make all over the sticky mess that we call the web.

As of now I can't think of how you can improve the site, if I think of anything, I'll let you know.

Thanks (to everyone at) Bit-Tech!

 

I love the home page. At a glance one sees all the new articles easily. The one think I am missing now is the main project logs. maye have a featured one each week? I hate it when I see great mods in the MOTM for the first time. :S Maybe I should stop working to keep up to date

 

The main thing for me is an inability to view past articles/reviews/whatever through anything other than browsing through everything, or searching. An index or contents or something is a must I think. Bit's favourite mouse? I hate to think how much reading and searching that would require, and it seems a pretty fundamental part of the website.

I think I mentioned before, but as a daily read Bit-Tech is great, but as a reference site it's pretty poor.

 

2nd'ed
Much prefered the days of just jumping into the forums from the article, rather than passing though the comments section.

Bauul makes a valid comment about it the site being a great every day read, but can sometime be a bit tricker to use as a refrence for older articles.
Saying that the search engine does work, and sometimes when searching for articles I may not find the one im looking for (mainly due to forgetting the articles full title), but would find a similar one, of which has related articles at the bottom, this has saved/helpped me on a numbeer of occasions, so dont even think about removing them! hehe

Other than that, I love the current layout, and prob make about 40+ hits to the front page and forums on a daily basis.

 

IMO, I think what would really help, is a database of articles accessible by users. It would be a lot of work but I think it would be excellent and be a big step forward in making the web site appeal to more people, the main problem with the main site is once an article is dropped off the front of the site it can be difficult to find. Would be nice if we could search for articles with several options like you can do when you search for a product in a shop.

You can pick say, monitors from a list, and because you don't want those silly regular monitors, you could select widescreen aspect ratio and 'cos you don't want a tiny one you pick a larger size bracket and click search. Then a list of monitors you have reviewed would pop up, with the date of the review and what score it got, a link to the review and a link to the shopping page if it has one. This could work for the entire site, so say I actually wanted to find news on monitors, like new products coming up or a new tech in development, or an article about monitors.

I think if you made this, I imagine it would be a huge amount of work, but you wouldn't really have to change the front page at all except to incorporate it in.

Oh one point off topic with games reviews I just thought of. When you have a multiplatform game reviewed, I understand why you stick to the one platform as it takes less time, but it would be nice if you can do a short comparison between the versions on the other platforms. Like for instance, at the end of a review before the conclusion (or in it) you could have a short comparison section, for example "The game ran better on X platform and also had better graphics, but the motion controls on the Wii/PS3 worked really well". That kind of thing. I don't think that would mean that you have to play the other platforms for too long before you get an idea of how it compares, so shouldn't add much to the review time.

 

That's exactly the kind of feedback we were looking for.

 

What's in their month in numbers feature?

 

Woo do I win a cookie?