Your new-look site is currently down.
Just thought I’d let you know, cuz if the site is down, you aren’t making any money.
By the way, can you go back to listing the genres on the sidebar, without me having to figure out, which one of the current sidebar headings, opens up the sub-menu for the list of genres? I really hate having to work that hard to find books I’m interested in.
Also, all that black is hard for my eyesight. The pages look pretty, but I’m having to squint to read the words. I don’t like squinting, it makes me want to move away from the website quickly, rather than perusing your offerings at my leisure.
Just sayin.
Emmy
January 8
3:26 pm
They planned an outage for 24-36 hours, as of yesterday.
Karen Scott
January 8
3:30 pm
Hi Emmy, that post is two days old, plus the new website was up this morning, hence my comments about the new functionality.
Emmy
January 8
3:38 pm
It’s still the middle of the night on the 7th for me, which is why I sort of thought their outage was still in the “planned” stage, and not the “epic fail” stage.
Karen Scott
January 8
3:45 pm
Time zones are such a pain aren’t they?
jmc
January 8
3:57 pm
Hmmm. I kind of liked the new set up when I checked it out last night. Except the excerpt link I clicked on wasn’t working.
Tuscan Capo
January 8
5:00 pm
Patience is a virtue 🙂 But yeah, I’m anxious to swing right over to the sub-genres without having to guess, too.
Treva Harte
January 8
6:37 pm
We’re working on it (well, actually I’m barred from even looking at it ’cause I’m the tech moron so don’t ask me anything) but LI is working on it. It will be a slow process but we’re undergoing improvement. (That sort of thing always takes time.)
di
January 8
9:52 pm
Ugh! I hate white text on black background. Hate. It.
Jaq
January 8
11:15 pm
I found the site hard to read and thought it was just my eyes being tired at the end of a long/hard at work day. But it’s the white font/black background thing.
Katharina
January 8
11:20 pm
I am getting a headache looking at all this black. And as you decided to do a re-desgin, why didn’t you include author pages and links to their websites? And did I mention that it’s way too black? And what happened to the header? It’s lacking symmetrie and classiness, the cool L-ID feeling definitely got lost for me, here. I know, in future I will have to look for an excerpt on the author’s site, because the background is hell on my eyes. Sorry, but all in all I liked the old design much better.
Karen Scott
January 8
11:49 pm
The home page opens up, but you can’t access any links. Wouldn’t it have been better, financially, to work on the new look, whilst keeping the old site functional Treva? I’m pretty sure that’s what EC are doing. Although their tweaks seem to be lasting quite a long time, considering that they actually went live with it.
And the site is definitely too dark for people to play on there for any length of time. Light and airy, is better than dark and eerie methinks.
Treva Harte
January 9
12:27 am
Honest, it’s not done yet.
cs
January 9
1:36 am
I’ve always thought Loose Id’s site looked cheap compared to others out there. I’m glad they’ve decided to vamp it up, because honestly it was a little ‘meh’ but one thing I did like about the old template was it wasn’t fussy and was simple.
The site is still down for me. Hopefully it’ll be nice and spiffy when it returns.
ETA: The site is (semi) back up for me…and dear God the colours. Ouch.
GrowlyCub
January 9
2:57 am
I have to admit, I’m rather baffled, too, why they’d go live with a site that they didn’t beta test, or why, once they realized the new site wasn’t operational, they didn’t upload the old site again.
They are losing money and major face. This kind of stuff looks extremely unprofessional. I haven’t looked at it yet, but the old site with the dark colors and light type was really awful for seeing impaired people, are you guys saying it’s even worse now? I hope not!
I was going to point people to FW, but a) I just realized that the last LI book I bought from FW came with DRM and b) with the Overdrive issue going on, I’m not buying anything there either.
Give me a paper book, a kingdom for a book, or however that goes in the original (that’s my ‘loose’ re-translation from German, grin).
Jay
January 9
2:58 am
I have never seen that site before, but the current design they are sporting seems pretty nice to me. I’ve been looking for a new theme to use, as I am not too knowledgeable on creating the design myself. I have the vision, but just not the skills to do it. Isn’t that a pain?
Treva Harte
January 9
7:12 pm
I’m going to give you our standard answer to the questions now because this is getting totally beyond my field of expertise. Please check in with customer service at help@loose-id.com for other questions. Please see below:
I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. The site is still at:
http://www.loose-id.com/
On January 7, we moved to a new web hosting service and re-launched with a new site design. It will take up to 72 hours for your local Internet Service Provider to update its pointers to our new DNS entry. Please bear with us for up to 72 hours as the Internet rights itself.
If you placed an order and were not able to download the books, please login to your account on our site and click View My Order history. Do not create a new account; if you forgot your password, click the Forgot Your Password link to retrieve it. Note: Your orders may not display in chronological order at the present time. If you have multiple accounts at the Loose Id site, you may need to log into all of them to locate your order.
Also, I apologize again for the inconvenience, but orders placed prior to January 7 may not be viewable at this time. We are working to fix this issue. Please try in a day to download them again.
If you mentioned a feature that is not yet incorporated in the new site, please know that some functions could not be coded until the site was live. Our development team is working as much as possible to correct these issues. Thanks for your patience.
If you still have problems in a day or so, please let me know and I will help.
Regards,
Doreen DeSalvo
Loose Id
MousieOne
January 15
9:53 pm
Too much black. White font is too small for all that black. Can’t adjust the size much in one of my browsers. In another browser the blurb text doesn’t show up at all unless I highlight it. I can zoom the page but even then the font still stays relatively small IMO.
If the site stays this way, I definitely won’t spend quality time playing here because it’s too hard on my eyes. Please consider moving that left sidebar onto your top menu bar. It’s a terrible waste of space that could be used to make your covers & blurbs larger.
Either that or I’m getting old.
Katharina
January 15
10:00 pm
I agree, way too black. I haven’t been back to the site since they re-designed and probabbly won’t go there in near future. I have no appreciation for the new design.