RFC new RoboSavvy website online

[PedroR]

Hi all

After many hours of internal debate, tears, sweat and tweaking we are finally coming to our new version of our website.

We worked hard to make it look both comprehensive while explaining all that RoboSavvy does and honoring all our past.

> The Beta version of the website (the front page) can be accessed here http://robosavvy.com/web/
We invite you all to test and give your comments.

Needless to say this is still a work in progress; everything is in place with the exception oft he images (you'll find a large number of notes saying PICTURE:DESCRIPTION).

The rest of the website will follow this graphical language and style (the rest is not online yet):
- the web store is being re skinned (and categories re organized to make things clearer)
we'll be maintaining the existing back end for the time being.

- the forum will be migrated to the latest version of phpBB
authentication will be de-coupled from joomla, thus fixing the current bug that prevented people from updating their profile settings.
In addition the new forum is set for manual approval of the first posts of every new user. This means that by default spam posts will always be invisible.
We'll be maintaining the ability to upload an manage your files in the /Builders directory.

- The current website (with the wiki, great user contributions from members) will be kept alive, read-only, for archival purposes.
There are great resources and contributions there and we decided to keep it alive. (we'll just re-skin the CSS to make it belong).
Users will no longer be able to log in to the old website but all content will be available in read only format.


We welcome your feedback about the layout on the upcoming front page http://robosavvy.com/web/

Thank you
Pedro.

[i-Bot offline]

Great to see you updating the website, but ouch such a big change. Of course I am reluctant to change at my age, and I have been looking at the existing pages almost every day for the last seven years!

I just don't rate it.

To me Robosavvy presents awesome products, quality support from people who actually create robots, and supports an active robotic community. You have tried to say this in words, but in reality the home web page should say it without words.

If I throw up the new page against Adafruit, Trossen, and Robotshop, they all look more interesting to me. The above sites and the old Robosavvy site all give me some "I want one of those" signals. The new site does not, just floods me with "you need us" company wordy stuff.

The old Robosavvy home page is maybe too complex, but it does fit in rather well as the backdrop to my desk which looks much the same.

I did try the on my iphone to see if you were trying to simplify to address smaller screens, but that was even worse, with lots of errors !

I sort of hoped your message was spam!

[siempre.aprendiendo offline]

Well, I like it.
As Mike said it looks more clear. But, unlike Mike, I really like changes
It looks discretly futuristic, and I think is better, too much futuristic usually looks childish.

[PaulL offline]

I realize work was put in to the new site effort, and that work deserves praise, regardless of opinions, so Thanks to those who've put forth the effort!!!

Following are my opinions, and I hope I don't upset anyone...

I'm not so sure I like the new site.

I think the new site is a bit dry, not a lot of character. It's clean, and it's clear that clean was a goal, but it's a bit too clean. I think the heavy use of CAPS in a clean font kind of adds to that.

I don't know, if it were me, I'd be trying to sell an experience instead of a product. An experience is something that involves potentially many products in more of a continuing and growing kind of way. As the name Robosavvy implies (robot understanding, etc), if I were to push a concept, it would be to offer products in the context of learning paths. The ultimate end game, bots that do unique and innovative things with products found on the site, would be a common fixture (pics, vids), a goal to strive towards, things to inspire creativity.

What would be nifty and useful... Hmm... A few ideas, I'm just tossing these out, I wouldn't even call them a suggestion:

* Skill Level Range for each product, something users can offer feedback on, like a poll, like "user difficulty level" or some such, maybe with links to projects or posts or what have you that use the product. For that matter, maybe an easy way to link a product to a post, like a mini product search / browser when posting, one click embed, etc.

* Product Rating / User Comments (Not just on FB!).

* Project Blogs. I have a lot going on with my project, but only one thing at a time, so I jump around a bit between posts to the various sub-forums. If each user could have their own blog, and / or some kind of way to switch between a blog view and forum view (ex, let users write on a blog and choose a forum in which to post an entry, or post on the forum and choose to copy to blog, something like that), that'd be nifty. For each entry (forum or blog), product links / thumbnails could be added if it was made easy to do (ex, inline lookup, like typing a name on FB, etc).

* Bot Part Repository for 3D Printing - FREE designs right here for use with the printers available here. Maybe rating / comments for those.

Robosavvy has a personality, the site has character - the new site doesn't convey that character. If you don't want that character, that's OK, but then what will replace it?

I suppose the real question is, what will attract new visitors, new customers? Maybe the new page is the answer. Maybe it's not, I don't know. I'm just saying be very careful about such a dramatic change.

Perhaps we're not even the ones you should be asking! We're all biased. Some of us have been around a good while and are very used to how things are.

Paul

[PedroR]

Hi all

Thank you for all your comments

We've taken as much input as possible to try and incorporate that in the current version of the website.
There is already a roadmap in place for V 1.1 as there are many things we'd like to improve.
However we need to draw a line and close the feature set to go live (we've been staging for quite a long time now).


One thing that we'd like to re assure the forum members is that the Forum and the community side of it will remain un touched and will hopefuly be improved (fixing the long oevrdue bug on editing profiles and other artifacts we spotted over time).

As you may have noticed, we are now more actively posting news and they are all posted on the forum (along with Social networks).
We understand this is not yet the DIY content we used to have every day, but part of the plan is to start talking more about what we're doing in the lab; we have some interns working on smaller scale projects which we hope will be more appealing to the DIY community in addition to projects like the 1m tall robot which is much more specialized.

We'll begin the migration of the website tomorrow and I'll be making a separate post about that.

Migration will be done in two stages: first the front page and a re skin on the current store.
The forum will remain in its current format for another 2 weeks, with the Login system in place and still being served by the current Joomla setup.

In the second week of August the forum will finally be migrated. The reason for delay in migrating the forum is mostly because we want to ensure a smooth transition and do need some more time: we used to allow a lot of HTML in the posts which needs to be edited out and converted to the new markup. It's also being "de coupled" from Joomla which will fix a large number of past issues.

As always we remain open to suggestions.

Kind Regards
Pedro.