Ladies and gents, we would like to warmly welcome you to the all-new, completely redesigned Carscoops.com, which fittingly, coincides with our site’s 10th birthday – she’s still a toddler. Take it as a gift to you, our readers, for supporting and sticking with us all these years. Now, how about we drop the chequered flag and see what’s new?
Main Goals
With the redesign, we wanted to bring the cosmetic and technical aspects of the site up to date, all while keeping it simple and user-friendly, and without alienating our readership. At this point, we’d like to thank David Kutcher of Confluent Forms, who was responsible for all the technical work under the hood.
Styling and Gallery Viewer
On the styling front, we went for an uncluttered and modern look with an auto magazine feel, adjusted to the needs and wants of modern internet users.
We also upgraded the image gallery viewer, which now works much faster, allowing you to flip through the pictures in four different ways: mouse buttons; selecting one of the smaller in-screen pictures; through your keyboard’s arrows and via the scroll button on your mouse.
Goodbye FWD, Hello RWD!
The biggest change of all is that we went from a FWD (Fixed Website Design) to a RWD (Responsive Website Design). What this means is that, our site now automatically and seamlessly adjusts to your device – from mobile phones, to tablets, netbooks, laptops and big screen desktops. Try it out.
Allow me to mention here that, while videos show up and resize fine, one problem we’re still working on is to allow you to scroll through our galleries on mobile devices. For now, we’ve disabled this option, with pictures on phones currently opening in separate tabs.
eMails, Comments and Social Media Updates
Since we changed our site’s name from Carscoop to Carscoops and our address from Carscoop.blogspot.com to Carscoops.com last year, it’s only fitting that we complete the move with our email addresses. You can still use the carscoop@gmail.com, but our new emails are carscoops@carscoops.com; info@carscoops.com, tips@carscoops.com and my personal email at johnh@carscoops.com.
Adding to our existing Twitter and Facebook accounts is a new Google+ page for our site.
In regards to the comment section, we’re thinking of allowing immediate uploads without moderation for comments that do not include links (for spam-checking purposes) or certain words that may be offensive or inappropriate. In these cases, the comments will be moderated. For this to work, we’ll need to your help to keep it clean and to notify us if there’s something we need to look at by sending us an email at info@carscoops.com
What About The Future?
For starters, we will be tweaking certain aspects of the site over the coming hours, days and weeks, based on our own observations and of course, your valued input. We’re also actively looking to add new staff writers to our team and expand our reach, all while staying true to the core values of our site, so if you’re interested, give us a nudge.
New Reader Posts Section
Internet is about sharing, so we’d love to give you, the reader, the opportunity to articulate your opinions, experiences and comments on anything auto-related in a meaningful way by sending your pieces to our site. You won’t be paid in real coins or even Bitcoins, but if your post meets our quality guidelines and criteria (we’ll update with more details soon), you’ll get to see your ramblings on our website – hey, for some of you, it beats writing an essay in the comments!
Let us know what you think
We want you to weigh in on the redesign and share your thoughts, ideas and recommendations with us in the comments. If you want to spread the word, that’s fine with us too.