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New slide-down menu
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Blog site canceled
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New "leave a comment" feature
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WCF faster for Europe, Middle East, Asia and South Africa
Many of you have already noticed that we removed the navigation menu which contained links to the main categories such as: News, Photos, Videos, Spy Photos, Tuners, etc. located on the left side table. Also removed was the “Jump to a manufacturer” menu which expanded to show a long list of car manufacturers when you hover your mouse over it. Why would we do such a thing? Removing the site's navigation is a big mistake, so you say!
We decided to remove these navigation menus mainly because very few visitors were using them. But we received many complaints over the months about how the fly out menu would expand with any unintentional mouse hovers as well as requiring some steady mouse control to expand properly. But also, removing the menus cleaned up the page design and put more focus on the stories. However, no need to get angry with us. We haven't removed the navigation menus; we just relocated it to the gray header bar just underneath the WorldCarFans logo. You'll notice some new links: Manufacturers, Motor Shows, Categories. Click on these and a new menu quickly slides down revealing all of the same buttons as before plus a few new ones. Click it again and the menu slides back up out of view. No more accidental flying menus and all of the car manufacturer pages are easily accessible from one menu. It might take some getting used to, but once you've adapted you'll be flying around WCF like never before.
Back in March we built our own blog site, but it didn't take us long to discover that it wasn't working out. Not only did the blog format not appeal to us from a web development perspective, but it was a bit of a conflict with the WCF main site as we ran into difficulties trying to decide where to put certain topics. Although we went into the editorial process with rules and guidelines to help us decide what topics go where, they quickly got obscured once put into practice. So, we killed the blog too.
No love lost though, since we salvaged some of the blog's best features such as the comments and category systems and integrated them into WCF. Now, you can share your thoughts with the rest of WCF readers on all articles. Just scroll down to the bottom of any story, login and leave a comment. But remember to submit and confirm your email address when leaving a comment for the first time. Otherwise it will not be posted.
On the technical side, we completed some major projects with our IT infrastructure and web development. It has taken us 4 years since we first envisioned these upgrades, and now due to the steady growth of WCF we are finally able to make them happen. For the first time ever, WCF is now serving at a significantly improved speeds to Europe, Middle East, Asia, Australia and South Africa. No more slow page loads as WCF load balances all global traffic at the DNS level across two server clusters on two continents. Naturally, conditions beyond our control such as Internet latency and slow ISPs can affect WCF site performance, however, the addition of the new server cluster combined with the routing of visits to their closest server via DNS greatly minimizes those obstacles. As traffic continues to grow in the coming months and years, we expect to deploy more server clusters to regions of the world that want more of WCF.
None of this is possible without the support of our readers! As always, we depend on your feedback to make WCF successful. Are the new changes good or bad? Please leave a comment below or email us at: feedback[at]worldcarfans.com.
Our sincere thanks from all of us at WCF.
