Old version of the Galleries comments page:
Coming-soon version of that, and the other pages (note the tabs near top):
All that white space at the top right makes me think I need to develop a logo.
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My current pages take a long time to load, because they are going back to the database a zillion times for detail. My database server and webserver are both suffering far too heavy a load for the amount of data that's actually happening in the site. There's a lot of stuff that I "should have" done more of up front on that website, like views, stored procedures, and much better SQL that would put more of the processing in the database and less in the middleware, and much better middleware coding, that would minimize the amount of work and time.
The new grids load all the data in at once. The page/tab loads much faster than my ordinary pages, although then waiting for the grid to populate seems like it takes a bit but that's mostly just because instead of waiting for the page to change/load, that happened right away and now you're just waiting on the data. But, once it loads, it's all there. You can do a radical subset or opposite sort and pagination and it is nearly instant -- no waiting another long time for another page to load. So I can not only show the most recent comments in the galleries, but I can let someone click a filter to show comments to them, or from them, or anything from the oldest rather than newest date, and bam there it is. Stuff that would have taken a page load and another wait the old way.
I think not only is this going to end up saving a whole lot of load on my server, but I think it's also going to result in more pages visited, in part due to the speed and in part because I think the tabbed pages make it more intuitive to click through each one, than to 'go find' other pages in the former layout.
The one thing I expect will get to people is that we are all used to putting as many records on a page as possible so we don't have to change pages so often. The grid refreshes only the grid, not the page. That means if you add records so you have to scroll, when you press the 'next' button, the grid shifts--but it doesn't take you back up to the top of the page. You'd have to manually scroll up for that. But the grid is so fast to change pages that it really doesn't matter if there are fewer records in the main display. (I made an option for people to change it.) But I think that will take users some getting adapted to.
In the meantime though, I'll be much more willing to 'claim' the site to other programmers if it looks better. I once made this lovely, clean, elegant, white with blue and silver design there and showed it to a dozen people and like 1 or 2 liked it. All the rest said they LIKED what I called the 'circus nav', different colored buttons along the top of the page, etc. It was just painful. I'd worked out these lovely flash-based forms and everything... ah well. I didn't want to alienate them by making it actually seem SO much more classy and professional that they weren't comfortable in their hokey walmart website anymore, haha! I used to do a site for a guy who ran this multimill company selling satellite TV stuff. He deliberately wanted it to be slightly hokey. He felt that was his audience and their print catalogs had that in mind too. Kinda interesting.
It took me nearly a week of nights and all weekend just to get two pages done seen above, and the filters aren't even working right yet. It's exhausting. But hopefully I've learned enough now -- I'm having to learn a LOT of stuff! -- that the rest of the galleries will go much more smoothly. Ironically I didn't even go in there to do anything in this part of the website. I went in to work on this project called Taskerbot, but got distracted.
PJ
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