March 2013: Redesign Feedback, Permanent Page Links and Geocoding
Two weeks after the Places2Swim redesign, response has been positive and an early page-loading problem is fixed. Geographic pages now keep permanent addresses, and geocoding reached 63.7% of listings.
Our March 2013 pool listings update is an end-of-month look at the first two weeks of the redesigned site. Response has been almost uniformly positive, though geocoding slowed while the new site went live.
Feedback on the redesign
The new site has been online for a little over two weeks. When it launched, a conflict between our code and third-party code on the page kept some pages from downloading properly. We resolved it within a couple of days, and we thank everyone who reported it.
Most of the other comments we received came from misunderstandings rather than real problems. The orange boxes at the top of the country, state or province, county or region, and city or town lists let you skip through a long list to the place you want. They are especially useful on tablets and smartphones, and they work on a desktop computer too.
Places2Swim is not connected with the facilities it lists. The "Important Notice - Please Read" link at the top of every listing page explains this.
Permanent page addresses
In the old system the whole site was reindexed every week, so none of the geographic pages could be bookmarked. Adding or reclassifying a county or city late in the alphabet changed the ID of every county and city after it, whatever country or state it was in.
Now that the database is permanently hosted on the server, the indexing is permanent too. You can bookmark a country, state, county or city page, such as the page listing every county and city in England, or use its address as a link on your own website, and it should not change again.
Geocoding
Getting the new site online slowed our geocoding, the work of finding each listing's latitude and longitude. We geocoded only about 200 listings in March, which brings the total to 63.7% of all listings.