Here are my thoughts.
I love the actual redesign. Makes the site much more contemporary and modern, and much more eye pleasing. But it exacerbates something that has been irking me recently about DDMS, which maybe can be fixed with minor tweaks.
The nature of DDMS is that people check it multiple times a day to make sure they don't miss a good deal. Up until about 6-12 months ago, just by clicking on the site you were able to see the last deal or two, and you knew right away if any deals were added since the last visit. For the last months, however, often more than one deal was stickyed at the same time, which made the default view after opening the site meaningless - the same two sponsored posts could be there for days at a time. In order to see if anything new was posted, you had to scroll down, which is annoying if you are checking a site multiple times a day.
I didn't speak up then, because I understood that ad revenue drove the site, and I am happy to do that extra step in reverence to the ads.
This new update makes it even worse. The featured deals block takes up the whole screen when you open the site. You now have to scroll further, past stickyed posts, to see if a new deal was posted. And while I know that the featured deals and the stickyed posts are the lucrative ones, at this point I think they are serving as a significant detriment to the classiness that makes DDMS so enjoyable. Yes,
Lakewood Scoop surely makes ad revenue, but I'm sure DDMS has no intention of following in their footsteps...
I think that there may be a simple design fix that can be implemented, but I'm not sure what. Maybe some sort of duel heading bar. Even just putting a box near the top that says "Latest deal" - with a single deal in there, already lets viewers know if anything was added since their last visit.
Not trying to complain, just to share honest feedback about something that has been nagging me. I wonder if others felt the same...
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