Thread: I love Classipress but.....

I love Classipress but.....

From doing a test of the 3.1, there are some excellent new features I can see. And that is most welcome.

I believe that Classipress has one major flaw, which is holding it and the people who use it back, and that is the structure of the ad posting from.

1. Users should be able to post ads without registering. I know there is a hack for this, but it should be standard. The number of ads I receive has increased significantly since I moved to registration free ad posting.

2. The image upload process is terrible. In every other successful classified site, images are uploaded in a special environment which prevents multiple images being uploaded simultaneously. What happens in classipress is that people enter a number of images, lets say 5 into the ad posting form, then click proceed. This means that 5 images, perhaps 4mb each, are being uploaded simultaneously without a progress report. People are stupid and they dont know whats happening so they click proceed again and it causes problems. This is the most important flaw in the ad posting system and needs to be a priority for the next update.

Modern cameras are taking images of 4, 6, 8 mb. Alot of people are too stupid to reduce the size, so you need to make it easier for them. This is what Gumtree do, and Blogspot to name just two. There is a process whereby users upload one image at a time, with a status bar so people know whats happening.

Here is the gumtree system in action:
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/1503/screenshotes.png

Here is blogspot:
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/3...enshot1obn.png

Here is a site which has a really excellent ad posting structure called donedeal.ie -
http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/7...eenshot2md.png



These two issues which need to be fixed in the ad posting process, are not that complicated, they just require the will and the realisation that forcing people to sign in doesnt work on small classified sites. It may be ok for ebay or whatever, but if you are a new site, people need to be coaxed into placing the ad by making it as easy as possible.

Since I switched to allowing users place ads without registration I have had a huge upswing in the number of ads.

There needs to be a serious analysis of the way other successful sites work, and then apply that to classipress.