A moment of reflection
Posted on August 24, 2006 by Tim Huckle
Filed Under Ramblings |
Maybe this evening’s antenatal class has shocked me out of a web-induced coma (was it really necessary for a ‘fresh’ placenta to be brought up from the maternity ward for us all to gaze at?!); but my late night cruise of the interactive investor website and review of bugs raised over the last few weeks has left me wanting to reassure you of a few things. Perhaps in some way I’m practicing the reassurance techniques the midwife suggests I’ll need in a couple of months.
If I’m to be honest (and I have no reason not to be. If the CEO isn’t happy with what I write I’ll just delete it and pretend it never happened), then there’s plenty to be done with our website. I guess I just want to confirm that certain things don’t go unnoticed, namely:-
Site speed - Put simply many of our pages take an unacceptable amount of time to load. Whilst I accept we’re never likely to be the fastest website out there, due largely to the dynamic nature of much of the content, we have not focussed enough on analysing certain key areas where performance degrades under load or less obvious conditions such as 3rd party advertising scripts having knock on effects on page load. Some pages had a simple fix made today which greatly increased their speed…..and reviews will be more regular going forward.
Service Availability - The good news to come out of some lengthy outages recently, albeit planned, was that the Oracle 10g database upgrade was successful and is now operational. Previous entries to this blog highlighted the problems we’ve been having with the upgrade, I’m pleased that this work is now largely complete. There is however inevitable bedding down to do and some of the speed variations will be due to the database and the underlying code requiring further tuning.
Downtime costs us money, damages credibility and reduces user loyalty - of course we take it seriously. Having had a discussion with several users about our recent weekend outage it seems we could have done better in terms of advance notification and have agreed that a sitewide message under the top navigation bar will appear at least 24 hours prior to the service being taken offline for any significant period.
Data Reliability - It’s a full time job to manage datafeeds and our ambitions are to add more exchange data in to the mix. Our Level1 and 2 data hasn’t been the most reliable and some of our tools are falling behind competitively in my view. This is where much of our focus is now and will be for at least the next six months. Several projects are underway to enhance what is clearly our core offering - a market leading source of data, investment research and portfolio tools. I hope we can involve many of you in the development stage.
General Usability - We’re ‘a crystal maze’ according to one of our users participating in a recent usability session. Spot on. Landing on our home page for the first time must be overwhelming to most; trying to buy or apply for some of our products is no doubt confusing to many and overly complex even to the web savvy. Changing the site to meet the needs of some will of course upset those who are familiar already, so the current usability study will help us make a series of small but refined ‘tweaks’ to the way in which you interact with us, your fellow users, our tools, our services and the site overall.
And that’s just the half of it…..the wife is calling. Pah! And they said my life would change 
If you want to help and give me an excuse to sneak off to the pub for an evening (Central London) please do drop me an email - tim@iii.co.uk ; I’d love to discuss how you’d like to take the site forward.
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