Testing our new Beta Site - beta.www.parallax.com
Jen J.
Posts: 649
Greetings intrepid members of the Forum.
You are the first to be invited. Please keep this Beta test semi-hush for now.
Our new commerce web site is in Beta. Please take a moment to check it out and provide us with feedback. Beta.www.parallax.com is quite different from our current commerce site; we have worked very hard for over a year to design a new site that will meet our company goals and the needs of our customers (both existing and new).
Browser compatibility: We recommend IE9+, Firefox (Mozilla), and Chrome. Internet Explorer 8 and older are not recommended. IE 6, 7, and 8 are no longer supported by Microsoft and as such we do not support them. Link to latest versions of: IE, Firefox, and Chrome.
New features include:
1. Responsive web design. The site recognizes your browsers width and changes the layout accordingly. View Beta on your desktop, your tablet, and/or your mobile device. Simply change the width of your browser to see it in action.
2. Easier Store navigation. The left hand menu is a list of the product categories in our store, making it easy for you to navigate to products and product resources.
3. Improved search capability. The Search will search product as well as content pages (and it is pretty fast too).
4. Improved downloads. Search for downloads of current and retired products. View entire families of related downloads in one place. http://beta.www.parallax.com/downloads
5. News. Parallax Insider News (PIN) shall take the place of the Parallax Insider blog that we were posting on the Forums. PIN will feature company news, upcoming event plans, projects, and more. News will be updated frequently.
6. Increased product focus. This new site is your place to find information, download documentation, and link to other product resources. When it came time to reimagine our web site, we needed our commerce site to become just that, a destination for commerce. Some projects were moved to our Learn.parallax.com site as inspiration. Other projects that were outdated or did not contain enough content to be helpful to customers were abandoned. Please note, if you would like to post a project at any time we offer the Projects area on our Discussion Forums. http://forums.parallax.com/forumdisplay.php/61-Projects
Changes to look forward to
1. Checkout. We have a bit more internal testing to do, but you will soon be able to order on beta.www.parallax.com
2. Daily Deals are coming back! You asked for the return of the DD, and we have heard your request.
3. Increased integration with our Learn site. Learn.parallax.com is a big part of Parallaxs plans for the future. It is the place where you can find tutorials, projects, teaching resources, and inspiration. As we move forward, look for greater integration between these two sites.
If you find any problems or have suggestions, please contact our web team at webbeta@parallax.com
Thank you for trying out our Beta site. We appreciate your help and your patience.
Cheers, Jen J.
You are the first to be invited. Please keep this Beta test semi-hush for now.
Our new commerce web site is in Beta. Please take a moment to check it out and provide us with feedback. Beta.www.parallax.com is quite different from our current commerce site; we have worked very hard for over a year to design a new site that will meet our company goals and the needs of our customers (both existing and new).
Browser compatibility: We recommend IE9+, Firefox (Mozilla), and Chrome. Internet Explorer 8 and older are not recommended. IE 6, 7, and 8 are no longer supported by Microsoft and as such we do not support them. Link to latest versions of: IE, Firefox, and Chrome.
New features include:
1. Responsive web design. The site recognizes your browsers width and changes the layout accordingly. View Beta on your desktop, your tablet, and/or your mobile device. Simply change the width of your browser to see it in action.
2. Easier Store navigation. The left hand menu is a list of the product categories in our store, making it easy for you to navigate to products and product resources.
3. Improved search capability. The Search will search product as well as content pages (and it is pretty fast too).
4. Improved downloads. Search for downloads of current and retired products. View entire families of related downloads in one place. http://beta.www.parallax.com/downloads
5. News. Parallax Insider News (PIN) shall take the place of the Parallax Insider blog that we were posting on the Forums. PIN will feature company news, upcoming event plans, projects, and more. News will be updated frequently.
6. Increased product focus. This new site is your place to find information, download documentation, and link to other product resources. When it came time to reimagine our web site, we needed our commerce site to become just that, a destination for commerce. Some projects were moved to our Learn.parallax.com site as inspiration. Other projects that were outdated or did not contain enough content to be helpful to customers were abandoned. Please note, if you would like to post a project at any time we offer the Projects area on our Discussion Forums. http://forums.parallax.com/forumdisplay.php/61-Projects
Changes to look forward to
1. Checkout. We have a bit more internal testing to do, but you will soon be able to order on beta.www.parallax.com
2. Daily Deals are coming back! You asked for the return of the DD, and we have heard your request.
3. Increased integration with our Learn site. Learn.parallax.com is a big part of Parallaxs plans for the future. It is the place where you can find tutorials, projects, teaching resources, and inspiration. As we move forward, look for greater integration between these two sites.
If you find any problems or have suggestions, please contact our web team at webbeta@parallax.com
Thank you for trying out our Beta site. We appreciate your help and your patience.
Cheers, Jen J.
Comments
Edit: Could there be a link to the forums up at the top (under "Support"?) Other wise, you need to scroll down (possibly) to get to the forums link at the bottom. I'll send this to the email address too.
Thanks!!
I like the hierarchical menu bar on the left. That's nice. However, when presented with a right-pointing arrow, most people expect to be able to click on it and have it converted to a down-pointing arrow, with the expanded list presented below it. Then, when clicking the down-pointing arrow, the list should collapse with the heading reverting to a right-pointing arrow. In the new website, you have to click on the heading itself to get the down-pointing arrow and expanded list, and there appears to be no way to get the list to collapse again, except by clicking a different heading.
I hate to say it, but I like the format of the old product pages much better. The reason is that the old website presents much more information in a single screen-view. And it manages to do it with an abundance of eye-pleasing whitespace. In the new version, one has to scroll around way too much and click links to see the same information. Moreover, it's easier to read text that's in narrow columns than text that fills almost the full width of the screen, The gut feeling I get from the new product pages is more crowded and claustrophobic. Also, "Related Products" should not be given the prominence it is, just below the product picture and before the product description. It needs to be placed further down the page, as it is in the original website. And I miss the "Customers who bought this also bought ..." But maybe that will get filled in when the site goes live for purchasing.
I don't mean to sound negative; it's just my honest first impression and is meant to be constructive.
Thanks for the opportunity to review the new site!
-Phil
Edit: After reading mindrobots' post, I now realize that the product pages may have been optimized for mobile devices at the expense of larger-screen PCs. I wish there were a way to accommodate both.
All in all, the best thing about the website is the content. The worst thing is definitely the color/design theme: it's much too bland, and much to plain text (or link text). It's a place where I have to go (for the information), but not where I want to go (to browse).
Things I like:
- It's much faster than the old website
- The search is usable!
- I like your translations page.
- I like the "Robots Overview" page (although the "small" images seem to be a scaled large image, and take a while to load)
- The high-res pictures are nice (finally!)
- I like the "I have an Arduino" and "I'm Ready to Go Multicore" options.
- The layout and scaling looks good on my 30" monitor.
Things I don't like:
- The colors are a little dull (along with the new Obex...). The pages look like they are dying.
- The layout looks a bit clunky, with too much "plain text".
- That little hover over menu on the top doesn't reliably open up the sub-menus, and it's a bit slow (and not intuitive that there is something there)
- The search results are blah, should have recommendations for the matches (a search for PIR turns up way too much info, when it's likely that I just want the product page for the most recent version), and maybe pictures where relevant.
- The pictures in "news" is too small.
- On the product pages I think it would be better to put the "related" products in one of those sliding drawers. And if it has a sliding drawer, it should be openable/closable for each and every one (not tied together like they are now).
- The logos page should have the Propeller Beanie.
ps: Is parallax ever going to come out with a Prop BOE-BOT?
I like the way the menu bar at the top of the page works (or will when it's finished and all the hover drop-downs are functional).
After reading SRLM's post, I found the translations page. Excellent!
Search is much better. If I enter a product code, I get just that product instead of a screenful of related products as in the old site.
'Still poking around ... More later.
-Phil
Our goal is to keep links to external sites out of the header as it is bad for SEO.
Thanks for your feedback!
The colors have been changed to reflect our new silver and navy colors that match our new materials and retail packaging.
As we add users to the site we are collecting loads of data on how people are using the site so that we can evolve the search system. So expect changes in the future
We are working on the news image size, there are some recent changes that we are refining.
And yes we will be coming out with a propeller robot, I'm just not sure on the timing
Ooo. Very interesting! Thanks!
Yes! There are some issues with some of the smaller screen resolutions, anything browsing sub 768 px is going to start noticing a few elements that extend outside of the suggested barriers; scaling issues, I apologize.
We are working on testing all the known, frequented, or otherwise commonly used systems/tech/etc and attempting to provide a satisfactory experience through the site. We will provide a correction for this to be certain.
Aaaaaaaand thank you for reporting it!
We appreciate all the feedback.
-Tor
It seems the initial 'collapsed' class isn't being stripped away on the initial click, 'expanded' is added correctly; when clicking to a new item the classes are reapplied, and a returning click strips the 'collapsed' heading replacing it with 'expanded' as expected. That's a bug, I shall correct it. Thank you for locating it.
Collapsing the list again is a different sort of mind puzzle. Originally it was made hover-intent which doesn't work well for touchscreens, then it was made single click expand/collapse but the parent is also a linked category and the arrows are difficult targets to hit, and finally the current solution was settled upon. Other solutions include the parent as an 'all' but in some fields this is not intuitive, a secondary close-button but that recreates the tiny target issue, and a few others that are also not great; what I am going to try eventually is going with a hover-intent hybrid for non-touchscreen and swap for a drop-down for touchscreen, but expected issues will exist on trying to navigate the store on the tiny select list. Responsive design requires a lot of trial and error.
A search by "Download Title" only brings up Nuts and Volts Column "Get your Motor Runnin'"
If you go to the Downloads page at https://beta.www.parallax.com/downloads
And in the "Download Title" you search for "Nuts & Volts" all 8 volumes will show up then all the articles are listed as contents of that volume.
Ability to access these easily will improve when we expand the sites search capabilitis, which are on the way
You can also use the "Article" filter at http://beta.www.parallax.com/downloads
From there you should be able to see all volumes of Nuts & Volts columns 1 through 8 downloadable as a single '.zip. Some of the information from those articles may be used, indirectly, to give life to new projects and tutorials, where applicable, which would be a service from http://www.learn.parallax.com however the original wealth of that information is not lost; re-purposed may be a more apt term.
Emily, Thanks for the reply, but my same query just brings up the same one response I posted before. Tried with and without quotes.
Jim,
I just went to the download page, used the drop-down in "Download Type" to set it to "Article" and left everything else blank. I get the 8 N&V BS zips plus one N&V P8 zip for a total of 9 zip files.
Interesting Rick....but not too intuitive for a search function. Search for nothing? Search for Nuts and Volt makes more sense.
Maybe they are working on it.
http://www.parallax.com/tabid/272/default.aspx
It's probably best to drop words like and (or, the, of, &, etc.) from search terms and just match the remaining words. Or you could just tie into Google's search API for your site and be done with it.
Thanks Roy!
A search of just plain "Nuts" brings up all the article also. Just want to be able to sent newbies to the N&V segments.
(I wish I knew how to take photos of my product as well as you guys take photos of my product.
We would welcome any testing you'd like to do on the Beta site.
1. Front page, prominent links to LEARN.PARALLAX.COM, the FORUM and the OBEX are needed. (only 1/3 is there now like it should be.)
2. SX and SX/B information aren't there anymore. This may be a deprecated product, but those of us who spent a lot of money on SX are depending on those online resources that were on the old parallax page. There are some searchable downloads, but the previous SX page was a content and pictoral critical mass for me.
3. Top of screen drop downs are slow, sticky and sometimes awkward. They are also ugly. Another problem is that the submenu tops (for example under microcontrollers, it lists PROPELLER or BASIC STAMP) - if isn't clear that the top item is an item at all, since it appears separate from the drop down list. Also, left menu items often trigger appearance of drop down menus from top of the page.
First, the current page:
Here's the beta page:
The original page is nicely organized and shows me a lot of what I need to know right away. I get instant gratification. The beta page has a nice picture, but I have to scroll down past "related products" that I'm not interested in just to get an overview of the product I want to read about. But that's not all. After scrolling, I have to click another heading to see any details:
I'm not sure that delayed gratification works as a sales tool -- especially for impulse buyers -- but I guess I could be wrong about that. At the very least, a smaller font -- heck, I can read the beta site halfway across the room -- and columnar text would go a long way towards more inviting and instantly-informative product pages.
Oh, and move Related Products to a less prominent location.
Thanks,
-Phil
In the category pages such as this one, http://beta.www.parallax.com/catalog/sensors I feel that the images are too small and again, acres of whitespace.
And an that page: I don't think I, or many customers, really care about the product number either. If we were looking for that number we would search, not scan the listings page.
I was pleasantly surprised when I got my most recent purchase, and it had the nice "breadboard" theme on the packing tape. It's distinctive and nice. But the website is very plain, and I think it needs more than just silver and minor amounts of navy.
Also, thanks for fixing the icon issue in the title tab (it's now different between the forums and the main Parallax website).