Site Update: Time to Trim Away the Fat

The words ‘streamlining’, ‘cutbacks’ and ‘reorganisation’ are all too common these days, and despite sitting here gaily tapping away – my workstation a laptop on a pair of sweaty legs, my suit and tie a pair of sunbleched pants with the ass hanging out – Ubertramp.com will also soon succumb to a vicious round of ‘fat trimming’.

But it’s not as quite as severe as it first may sound.

One thing I’ve noticed since being away (in this case, away from home and the usual 8 hajillion zilla-bit broadband connection) is how slow Ubertramp.com loads from an internet cafe. And for a site aimed at budget travellers, where time IS money in internet cafes, that’s not a good thing.

I need to sharpen the mouse and ruthlessly hack away at the nice looking (read: slow loading) stuff. I need to cut the current Java eye candy in favour of good, wholesome, budget friendly HTML. Ideally, I’d like to do this via a wifi connection from my laptop laden with geeky but timesaving tools – but in reality I’ll probably have to do it from an internet cafe. Its going to be interesting, that for sure.

Over the next however long I’m going to be analysing, stripping back and re-testing the site and slowly converting it into a more streamlined beast built for speed and accessibility over looks and shiny bits. Though, over the next however long, I’m also going to be spending a healthy percentage of my time in a hammock.

The more important shiny travel gadgets, such as the interactive maps, will stay (although they’ll only be accessible to registered users to reduce database load and overall site load times) and many of the tabbed bits will be changed instead into lists. Registered users will still have normal functionality on the community side (and be able to search for other users, message them, link to their own travel sites, write travelogue entries, upload unlimited photos, find people near them on the maps etc) as these are all things that’ll help build a better, more helpful, friendly and useful budget travel community. If you’ve not yet registered, you can do so for free here.

Graphics will get compressed where possible, and non-essential icons and other eye candy will be ditched in favour of more basic methods of getting the point across. Sure it may look a little uglier, but ugly and useful has to be better than pretty and useless (or as it is currently from internet cafes: pretty useless.)

What the site will lose in looks I hope to gain in efficiency. Well, that’s the general plan, anyway.

I’ll have plenty of time to start planning the changes on the 12 hour journey to Surat Thani this evening, and when I next get a cheap and half decent internet connection I’ll put the plan into action.

In the meantime, enjoy the non-essential shiny stuff as its days are numbered!

Any feedback you have on this – such any comments or suggestions on what you should think should stay, go, or be introduced in the future – would be greatly appreciated. Ta.

See you at the beach.