New design and some cool features
August 30th, 2007
Time to refresh Wakoopa (hit CTRL+F5 or SHIFT+F5), because our new design is live!
About a month ago I started working on a new design for Wakoopa. Our current look and feel isn’t bad, but it could use some improvement. Some parts where clearly too boring or too crowded with information. We also had some things that we just couldn’t add to the existing design, like sub-navigation or extra buttons for new features. So I basically started from scratch and, as usual, first jotted down a few idea’s on paper.
Paper? Yeah that white thing that comes from trees, remember?
After this I set up the complete structure and added effects and coloring in Photoshop. Wouter came back from his vacation and gave it the thumbs up, and so did other colleagues. I sliced and hacked the whole thing around our current structure. Menno then helped me work out some of the last things to make it all come together.
During this time, we also tackled a few frequently requested features:
- Your profile now shows your birthday, gender and your location. Just fill it in in your settings panel, and will appear magically.
- Not only that, but your profile shows what operating system you use. “Finally” some of you would say, because it’s probably our most requested feature.
- Every software page displays what operating system you can use it on. In the future you’ll be able to use this data to activate a filter on Wakoopa, which will show you only Mac or PC software throughout the site.
- Recommendations should be a whole lot better. Starting with your personal dashboard, where we now also tell you why our system thinks you should use it. The “similar software” box on a software page has also gotten a mayor overhaul. And we’ve added a “people that use this also use” box, which will hopefully speak for itself.
- Every item on our blog is now mentioned on your dashboard. Quite handy if you want to keep updated on what’s happening at Wakoopa, and what new features are released.
- We’ve got a FAQ!
So there it is! Voila, a new look.
We see it as a foundation for new features, and hope that it will give (new) members of Wakoopa a smoother ride on the site. Making Wakoopa easier while adding new features will always be a challenge, but at the moment we’re quite pleased with our new look. How about you?
August 30th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Love the new design! The little snippets of info in the bottom corner are great too.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:58 am
I really love the new features! It’s awesome to see why software is recommended.
About the design;
I really liked the clean white look of the previous version. To be honest, I think the design isn’t a great improvment.
August 30th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Lookin’ good! More different shades of gray do the magic :)
August 30th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Damn it’s pretty !
August 30th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Great job on the new design; definately an improvement from my perspective.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Looks great, the interface has more depth to it now.
It also seems that i’m unconsciously spamming your ‘what are your friends doing’ section :).
August 30th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Great new design, I love it !
August 30th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
I like it — it looks great!
August 30th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
nice design
i like it
August 30th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Nice new design. A little less surrounding white makes it focus on content.
August 31st, 2007 at 4:07 pm
[…] launched a new design and Fleck showcased a couple of new features and the guys from Twones provided some interesting […]
September 1st, 2007 at 3:39 am
I’d like a place to have a shortcut to my homepage? I also like being able to explore others pages.
September 1st, 2007 at 10:48 am
The new design is awesome. I had troubles reading some of the text(grey text on white bg) with the old design.
September 1st, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Cheers the new design is very solid & crisp. Nice update
September 3rd, 2007 at 10:01 am
Hi there,
The site doesn’t properly render in Opera, especially the comments section.
Looks pretty cool but please support Opera browsers.
Thanks,
Muzammil
United Arab Emirates
September 3rd, 2007 at 10:03 am
Follow up: Its the ratings with comments that looks odd, but still works.
September 3rd, 2007 at 3:23 pm
@Muzammil: we’re going to look into the Opera issue, thanks!
September 4th, 2007 at 6:12 am
Looking good. :D
September 4th, 2007 at 6:12 am
Um, I like similes, perhaps add some common ones at least for the blog… ;)