The site has now been live for 40 hours now and I’d like to thank everyone for the constructive feedback so far. The positivity has been excellent to observe and everyone who has reported problems has done it politely and without too much frustration. Many of the initial issues were resolved quite quickly, but there are still some issues remaining, so I thought I’d address some of them now and let you know what is happening.
MOBILE OPTIMISATION & TABLETS
As I have explained several times, the site is not yet optimised for most mobile phones. Those of you who use mobile phones have found it difficult to access or leave comments. This will be addressed as soon as possible, but it’s not an easy job. On iPads it works very well if you have the latest software update. Some say they find they can’t scroll through the comments properly on an iPad but that is because you have to wait for them to load properly before scrolling.
It is also not possible to edit your profile on iPads. That’s not our fault. It’s down to iPad technology, I’m afraid. Mobile devices don’t have upload picker fields, so I’m told!
SEEN ELSEWHERE
Do feel free to recommend interesting articles you have seen elsewhere for me to include in the sidebar. This innovation seems to be fairly popular. I will keep it as up to date as I can, but I can’t keep track of everything that appears on other sites.
COMMENTS
Some of you don’t like the fact that the original post isn’t viewbable on the Comments page any longer. I suspect this is partly because it’s not what you’re used to, but at some point we’ll offer the option.
We are now only allowing one level of nested comments. On the previous site it was unlimited. We felt it didn’t add anything and was difficult to follow, so we do not intend to restore this.
We will also be adding a LIKE button to each comment.
SWEARING
We will be introducing an optional swearing filter, although this is not yet active. We’re all adults and I swear like anyone else, but one of the assets of this site is that it hasn’t stooped to the depths of some others. However, rather than have an outright ban, we’ll give you the option of reading some swear words or not. If you choose not to they’ll be &%$£*() hidden like that! As I say, that’s to come shortly.
WHTID TWITTER FEED
For some reason the Twitter band underneath the banner was responsible for the site crashing intermittantly so we have removed it while we find another option. We’ll be making much more use of the Twitter feed, so if you don’t already follow it, do so @iaindalewestham.
OLD POSTS
We’ll be importing all the posts from the old site soon, but we don’t think we will be able to import the comments, although we’re going to try. There will be an Archive in the sidebar.
USER PROFILES
You will soon be able to add your favourite players and favourite First Elevens. There will be a few other fields to tell users about yourself and where you live, and how you came to support the Hammers.
COMMENT PAGE: WHY IS THE SPACE ON THE RIGHT NOT USED?
We have plans. Just saying. Some have asked for the comment boxes to be made bigger and stretched across the screen. We’re not going to do that as it would look ghastly. I won’t tell you what we have planned for this space yet as it probably won’t happen very quickly.
PICTURES
As you will have seen, we now intend to use pictures on the sites within posts. However, we have to be very careful not to breach copyrights. If you have any West Ham related pictures you think we might use which are copyright free, please do email them to me.
NEW WRITERS
I’m keen to recruit a couple of new writers to our team. I want this site to step up a gear now, and it’s just not possible for SJ Chandos and I to do it all by ourselves anymore. So if you fancy writing for us, do get in touch via the Contact button at the top of the page, ideally explainign what you think you’d be good at covering, and also maybe enclose a sample article.
CONCLUSION
And that’s it! Please do keep your feedback coming. We’ll be making lots of improvements and tweaks over the next few weeks, as time allows. We’re always very happy to entertain new ideas.