Site Upgrades
I’ve made a few changes to the site so here’s a few quick notes on what’s new!
Sometimes, changes cause some temporary issues, if anything unusual happens, this can usually be solved by clearing the cache in your browser. This is due to the cache holding an old version of the site. Any problems, let me know.
Speed!
When the site first launched I put a lot of effort into making it speedy. But in recent months, it started to chug. As the site gains more and more traffic and more content is added it was slowing down, particularly on mobiles.
I hate slow sites! So I’ve upgraded to a better hosting package and spent a couple of days trimming fat out of the back end. The result is that page load speed particularly on mobile should be much faster, with estimated load times dropping from 5 seconds (ugh!) to a much more civilised 2 seconds.
Navigation
We used to have 2 menus, a public one, and a second one for Members. I’ve now combined this at the top of the page which saves space particularly on mobiles and means everything is all in one place.
Originally this was to hide members content from the public, but there isn’t really a point to that thinking about it! Everyone will be able to see all the links but only members can actually access them.
Dashboard
Just a few tidy ups here – State of the Market overall rating is still there but the old drop down State of the Market is gone – this is now a full weekly article accessible via the new Members Article links on the Dashboard.
When you click “Members Article Archive” this is now a full archive of all members articles of all time that is automatically updated. So if you want to look back at the Wonderkids articles etc, there they are.
Scouting
I review a lot of players and the Scouting lists were getting really long. I’d delete a few older entries to make a bit space – but this info is then lost.
Members might want to check back on old reviews to see what I said about players a few months back etc, it’s good for accountability.
So in a double win, I will now adopt a monthly approach where every month will start with a blank slate in scouting with the old months being archived as they were to flick back to if needed.
This reduces the clutter and means the older scouting info can be accessed when needed.
In the image below, you can see a snippet of the new Scouting look – the Spain scouting reports are grouped under the date and the Scouting Archive of previous months is accessible via the Scouting Archive links.
Also note that the old system of marking new entries with a 
is now redundant. They are all now grouped by date. This looks clearer and also has a speed benefit as believe it or not, loading those stars eats up some load time.
Finally
Other than that, you might notice a few cosmetic touch ups here and there. I’m mainly pleased with how speedy the site seems to be running (according to testing!) and I’m keen to find out if this is working in practice, so if you notice it is faster (or think it is slow) drop me a line on Twitter or at admin@footballindextrader.co.uk.
And if you have any other suggestions for improvements to the site, let me know, I collect them all and try to deliver the best user experience possible.
Cheers,
FIT.