Barty’s Weblog

It was sad to see the Warriors great finals run come to an end last night… but Manly were red-hot. At least the grand final rematch next week between Manly and Melbourne should be a cracker.

Sea Eagles 32
Warriors 6

“After 16 years and 312 first-grade games, it was the end for a rugby league legend.” – NZ Herald.

Gillette time anyone?

Since the “soft” launch of Mighty Ape we’ve been baby-sitting our web servers as they’ve been hit with a lot of extra traffic — a lot more than we expected actually.

The load on our web servers has been constantly high — not only are we getting more visitors, but people are staying for a lot longer than we expected. Just to compound things, the site is also getting “spidered” by our friends the search engines.

The irony is we’ve spent many months fine tuning our database structure and servers. We expected the database servers to struggle with the extra 900,000+ products. In fact, the database was redesigned twice in development until we finally got it right.

So far we’re happy with the performance of the database servers (in fact “Kong”, our master database server, has been having a holiday compared to the thrashing he got pre-launch!)… but roll on Monday. On Monday we’ll be rushing out to buy more web servers!

(P.S. – Go the mighty Warriors! Good luck to Ruben and the boys…)

GPstore has evolved! Early this morning we launched our new web store… www.mightyape.co.nz

Check it out.

Dick Smiths have recently launched their new web site and it’s fair to say its a small step forward.

From a design point of view, the most obvious change is the adoption of a ‘filter out” attitude when it comes to the content. On the product pages the content is divided into tabs… and users must click (dig) to see more information. That is extra work for users. On the category pages the content is split up into lots of genres, but some of them are very small… more work for the user.

Personally I don’t like their shopping cart. I’m not a fan of shopping trolleys that auto-update without you noticing that something has changed. It makes me wonder if the site works… or if I can even order things from it. We always use a trolley page (with the new item added to the top of the list) so customers know exactly what has happened (and then there’s also the added bonus of a really obvious “proceed” button).

Overall the new design is a small improvement and they have managed to drag the web site forward to this century. We’re pretty confident however, that our new baby will represent a more significant improvement over our current web site… one year later admittedly!

One of the interesting questions the DSE site does raise is — should the use of the Silver Fern be reserved for New Zealanders and New Zealand companies?

Dick Smith is Australian-owned. By using the silver fern… are they trying to pass themselves off as a New Zealand company? Something about that doesn’t seem quite right? Love to hear your thoughts on that.