We are excited to announce the launch of our updated website. Our main goal is to improve the user experience by providing our visitors with the information they need and delivering it fast and effectively. This is the first large-scale makeover that will then lead to a series of improvements in the future.
The last time that we redesigned the BookScouter site was clear back in April of 2010. (It was really ugly before that.) We’ve spent the past several months working on the new design and think that the new look is a huge improvement that makes the site look much more modern. None of the functionality has changed, but you may find some links in slightly different places. We’ve spent the last week fixing some minor bugs that were introduced with the redesign and listening to your requests for changes based on how you used the site. We’ve got a few more minor things that we’d like to clean up, but everything should be running pretty well now.
We’ve just added the ability to log in to BookScouter with your Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts. This makes it much easier to register and log into the site with just a couple of clicks. If you are logged in via a social network, you can also easily share the site with your friends or followers to let them know how to get the best prices for their used books.
As with anything on the site, we welcome feedback regarding these new features. Feel free to post comments here or email us using the Contact Us form.
We’ve just finished making some changes to the Preferred merchants listed on the site. With the number of buyback sites growing every month, we introduced the Preferred Vendor concept two years ago, and it has worked out really well. It makes the site faster for everybody, and it sends more users to those sites that can handle the higher volume and consistently have good user ratings. They also provide BookScouter a commission so that the site can continue to be used by anyone for free.
I’ve just completed moving the site over to the newer, faster servers, and everything appears to be working fine. There was no downtime that I was aware of, and everything went really smoothly. I’ve not done any concrete testing of the speed yet, but the site seems to be functioning a lot faster now. I’ve still got a few optimizations to make in the code to take advantage of some new features. The site is fairly complicated, so there is a chance that I missed something. I’ll be keeping a close eye on some log files over the next couple days, but if you see anything strange, please let me know about it so that I can make sure that it is running correctly.