Site update: Graham Hobson – Head of Technology

I wanted to give you all some further feedback on the most common issues being raised, and our progress in making improvements.

Firstly, a number of small fixes have been made in response to your requests and feedback.

Album changes

Photo names are now displayed in albums above each thumbnail. These are visible when you are viewing the medium and large sized thumbnails. Hopefully that will make your photo selection easier.

We have also turned off the marquee-select feature which we got very negative feedback about. Customers were having the problem that if they clicked outside of a checkbox it would de-select any photos they had previously ticked. Now fixed.

Picasa

We had to do quite a lot of chasing with our friends at Picasa, but this is now working ok. You can now use Picasa to upload to us as an alternative to the in-browser method or our desktop uploader.

Blurry thumbnails and shared albums

I reported last time that a number of you were seeing blurry thumbnails. This was due to the images from our old site being smaller than the new site and image stretching was making them look strange. We had several hundred million photos to regenerate and that process is now completed.

We have also now migrated all of the PhotoBox members who shared albums and so there should not be any further problems in seeing the albums you were expecting. If you still have a problem please contact customer services for some further investigation.

Pro galleries

I have seen some concerns in the blog comments about pro galleries. To re-state what my colleagues have previously posted, we are still running the original pro gallery service and this will continue to run until the updated version is ready. Pro gallery owners are still able to create new albums/collections, upload photos, set products and prices and modify all gallery settings.

Yesterday we put in place a change so that any sales generated on pro gallery are automatically transferred over to the new site, to be used as credit for purchases. Or alternatively you can request payment exactly as before.

And the big changes yet to come…

I would like to confirm that due to strong feedback the old FTP upload method will be reinstated by the end of May. To be honest we thought that with in-browser uploads (Active-X and Java, the same method that Facebook uses) and with a desktop uploader and with Picasa, FTP was no longer required. But clearly it is a popular feature so it will be brought back.

We are working on an improved print ordering journey that addresses many of the comments received so far. We have had agreement from some of the customers posting on this blog to review the new feature and give their feedback. That will happen towards the end of next week. Depending on the level of adjustment required we hope to have this live during the week after.

Clearly performance is still an issue and be assured we feel your pain! We are working as fast as we can to rewrite some parts of the website that are causing the biggest performance bottlenecks. I wrote quite a bit about the history behind this and the U-turn we are making in my last posting. You will see significant improvements by the end of May with further improvements during June.

A few words about production and customer services

I have seen some postings here about order problems (items delayed or not delivered). There is no reason why orders from the new site should be any slower than orders from the old site. Since the launch of our new site we have dispatched over 95% of our orders on-time and we expect to get this back up to our target of 98% in the next few days. Mark can give you a further update on service levels in his next posting.

During this time of changeover to a new site, we are seeing higher levels of calls and support emails than normal, and that means that there is a slower response than we would like. But we have increased the size of the customer services team and response times are returning to normal.

Once again, I would like to thank you all for taking the time to give us feedback. I realise that in most cases you give us this feedback because you share a sense of ownership of the service and care about what direction it takes. We are working hard to get past any problems raised and show you the real benefits of our new platform over the next few months.

I wish you all a very pleasant weekend.

Regards
Graham

New Site: Graham Hobson – Head of Technology

Hope your holiday weekend went well – it sure made a change to see the sun down here in the south.

I have decided to make a post to address some of the issues highlighted on this blog. As you are all aware we have launched a new version of our website to mixed responses. First the history: our old site was in operation for nearly 8 years. At the beginning of 2007 we started to build a replacement site. We wanted it to be a new platform to offer great new features and products to our customers for the next 5 years and beyond, and to make it easy for all users: pro and novice.

That site started to appear for some UK users during April and is now active for all of you.

To date we have received feedback from a number of different groups: a group of UK members who we migrated during April, survey response from UK members migrated over the past week and feedback from members migrated in France and Germany over the past few months. Generally the feedback has been positive, with only 16% of UK respondents preferring the old site. We have also seen record levels of ordering activity.

But clearly, based on your feedback below, many of you on this blog feel unhappy about some aspects of the new site. I am confident that we are already on the way to addressing many of these points.

The challenge now is to set some priorities, and make changes to the new site where necessary in order to respond to your feedback, and to improve the service further. Whilst we have an ambitious plan going forward, the plan for immediate improvements in the next month or so is pretty clear, so I thought I’d let you know what’s coming up.

Pixellated thumbnail images

This was caused by the process of moving over to the new site, which uses larger images (so your smaller images looked “fuzzy” when displayed in a larger space). We had several hundred million photos to convert but that process should be completed by Thursday this week. Please be assured that the original, full-res image has not been changed in any way by the move to the new site.

Album sharing

Again, there’s been problems caused by some people being still on the old site. Everyone with shared albums will be fully migrated by the end of the week, at which point all albums shared with you will be there for you to view again.

Large-quantity photo orders

It’s clear this and performance have been your main concerns. You should therefore know that we plan to go live with an improved way of ordering prints in the next 2 weeks. This will reintroduce the features you have expressed concern about, specifically, the ability to tick one, many or all images in the basket, then rotate, resize, delete or shrink-to-fit all of them in one click. We’ll also be introducing larger thumbnails during the ordering process so that cropping effects are easier to see.

Performance

Originally we designed the new site to be very “active” and to work much more like a desktop application supporting features like drag-n-drop and content updating without having to load a new page. Unfortunately some browsers support this type of site better than others and we know that the performance is unacceptable for some of the people posting below. We are doing a bit of a U-turn on this based on recent feedback.

You should expect a progressive improvement in performance of the new site starting with a major step at the end of this month. Our old site was causing us a few headaches towards the end, but it was fast so we set ourselves a hard standard to live up to. It may take us a little while to get back to normal, but I’m positive we’ll get to the performance you want soon.

Postcards

Finally, we’ll be steadily bringing in great new products and bringing back some old ones, the first of which being postcards later this month. Apologies for the delay, but I hope you’ll like the new version, which will have all the old features, plus more.

There’s much more to come of course, but I hope you’ve found this post useful. Either Mark or I will update again soon. Anybody out there who knows us will already be certain we’re completely focussed on making the new site as successful as the old one. We’re equally certain we’ll get there!

I appreciate that is has been a frustrating time but please be assured that we do agonise over every piece of negative feedback, and will do our absolute best to create the new PhotoBox that you all want. And we do very much appreciate your feedback. You are telling us what our priorities are for the period ahead.

Graham

New site: First day report

Without any exaggeration, yesterday was one of our biggest days ever at PhotoBox. Launching a new site is no mean feat, so I’m pleased to say it went very smoothly.

So far, about 30,000 of you have tried the new site, and though we’ve got a few issues to work through, services such as photo uploads, sharing and product ordering have been as popular as ever.

I do confess to feeling a bit sentimental however. I clearly remember the first orders going across the old site 8 years ago. I even printed all the photos then! It seems a bit strange to be moving on but nothing lasts forever, and everyone here is really fired up about the new products & services we’ll be able to roll out, as we fully move into our new home.

Back to those issues then - firstly thanks for all your feedback. Our customer service team have been pretty busy helping some of you through the new site, and we’ve been taking careful note of your comments and suggestions via phone, blog and email. Please keep them coming – we’re not perfect but we want to keep improving our service, and your feedback is what drives us.

It’s not possible for me to speak here on every point raised, but I wanted to comment on a couple of popular points:

Pros, Semi-pros, and other photo-junkies

You win the prize for the most vocal contribution so far. Not all good feedback, but where we’re not getting it right we’ll fix it. Specifically, we get your points on the flexibility and speed of ordering when you’ve got hundreds of photos to print on a tight timescale. FTP upload will be back shortly, and some missing products will be re-introduced, or superseded by better versions soon.

You should also know also that we’re fully committed to Pro gallery. Watch this space for a new improved version, which will be fully integrated into the new site later this summer. Meanwhile it’s business as usual for existing gallery owners via links from your new ‘My PhotoBox’ page.

Finally, I want to make it clear our core commitment to serious photographers remains: High-quality printing, fast turnaround and sharp pricing. You’re where we started; we don’t intend to leave you behind now!

Site performance

There’s a lot going on right now to improve performance over the next few weeks. Please bear with us – we’ve got some of the best software engineers in the business on this project, but moving millions of members and hundreds of millions of images takes a while, and a bit of horsepower. I’m confident you’ll see improvements as we tune the service, but it’ll take a few weeks to get it right.

I promise we’ll take all your other comments into account. In particular, look out for great new slideshow and sharing features appearing soon.

Please carry on posting your views here – I’ll be responding to the more common themes as they arise. I’ll also give you a further update on how the changeover’s going next week.

Have a great bank-holiday weekend!

Mark Chapman
Managing Director

Welcome to your new site

It’s been a long time in the planning, but I’m delighted to say your new site is now here for you to enjoy. Take a look for yourselves and you’ll soon find all your favourite features accompanied by much more.

The new site is a direct result of what you, our customers, have been telling us you want on PhotoBox.

So what can you expect? Well, here are just some of the highlights you can look out for:

• More photo gifts and innovative ideas
• Fun photo editing to transform your photos
• A new creative way to share photos online
• Photo tagging for fast photo searches
• New range of products with popular kids’ characters
• Regular photography news and tips to help you get the most from your photos
• Special offers and competitions
• PhotoBox blog for you to give us all your feedback

I’m confident that you’ll find the new site a great improvement, with lots of creative possibilities for your photos.

Feel free to voice your opinions on our blog. We’re really interested to hear what you like about the new site and anything you think we could still improve on. This is just the beginning for the new site. We will continue to add more products, community features and other interesting ideas to inspire your creativity.

And remember, if you run into any technical issues you can always refer to our Help pages or contact Customer Support.

All that just leaves me to say, here’s to the start of an exciting new era at PhotoBox.

Best wishes

Mark Chapman
Managing Director

 

New site: First day report

Playing tourist on the Thames

St Paul’s Cathedral on a sunny spring afternoon

The first warm sunny afternoon of the season (along with a boring workload staring me down!) could only mean one time: grab my camera and head out for a nice long walk in the sunshine. Making my way to one of my favourite strolling areas, St Paul’s Cathedral to Tate Modern via the Millennium Bridge, I soon realized that I wasn’t the only one playing hooky. Plenty of City worker types seemed to have found excuses to escape their offices (a benefit of economic downturn perhaps?) for a bit. A few large school groups huddled here and there, and more tourists than I would have imagined milled about in equal measures of awe and exhaustion.

Tate Modern’s iconic chimney behind a row of trees

I was hardly the only person with a camera as well, prompting me to wonder how many times on average London landmarks, such as St Paul’s or Tate Modern, are photographed daily? A quick glance at PhotoBox’s Public Albums suggests a great deal of photos indeed! One tip I’d like to suggest for shooting around this area of London is to
head up to one of the Tate Modern’s terraces facing the Thames. The best is the one adjoined to the sixth floor members’ room, but the terraces on the floors below offer stunning views too.

View of the Millennium Bridge from one of the Tate Modern’s terraces

Another tip, when crossing north to south along the Millennium Bridge (from St Paul’s toward Tate) is to stop just before the exiting via the bridge’s ramp and snap a few shots of the cathedral’s dome. I think this location provides a unique ‘old with the new’ shot and captures much of London’s spirit.

Photo of St Paul’s shot just before alighting the Millennium Bridge

Cheers,
Chris Osburn, PhotoBox Blogger