Hello! Just a quick note to say that after several months of fiddling, faffing, and scouring the thesaurus for other alliterative synonyms for fannying-about-in-frustration, we’ve finally put our new version of Monevator live.
We believe we’ve caught most of the bugs, but would appreciate it if you could report any you see in the comments below.
Now I know what you’re thinking: What new website? It looks just the same!
Well, leaving aside website caching issues – a fun feature of the Internet that means it can be hard to tell when your changes go live – the redesign actually aims to look pretty much the same as the old Monevator we know and love tolerate.
The main tweaks:
- The body copy text is larger and the maximum width of the article text area is wider. This should make it easier to read, especially on bigger screens.
- On desktop the site is now responsive – so as you resize your browser window to suit you, it narrows the body copy rather than you losing half of our unmissable words from the right-hand side.
- On iPad and most other tablets, there’s now a single column for the main article text. The right hand menu column of links and so forth is pushed to the bottom of the site. Again, easier to read.
- Mobile remains the super clean version that you guys love (and that has cratered our advertising income. 🙁 )
- The category and other menu pages have been given a spruce-up to make them easier to read and scroll through.
- Comments are paginated once more into blocks of 50, so you don’t have to wait for those huge 1,000-strong comment threads to load (such as on our broker comparison table [1]). The most recent 1-50 comments are shown first; you can browse back through the rest.
- Monevator should in general be a little bit quicker to load.
- A few other fiddly things you probably don’t need to notice.
Now, updating a ten-year old website that is held together in places with gaffer tape is never a foolproof process, and as I say we had to deal with a few hurdles along the way.
Here’s what I think we’re left with:
- The Search feature isn’t working at the moment. Don’t know why. We’re on it.
- The 404 ‘page not found’ page has, er, vanished and needs to be found.
- When articles are closed to new comments, there’s no notification of this at the end of the thread. The comment box just vanishes. Annoying, and we’re fixing it.
- On old articles, any links to Amazon embedded in the body text are forcing line breaks, which I can live with but looks ugly. Again we’re exploring a workaround.
If you spot any other bugs, please let us know below.
Spare any change, guv?
Of course changing the site design has messed up the look-and-feel of some of the older articles. That’s not really a bug, more a symptom of progress.
Your gran doesn’t look her very best these days, but you still love her, right?
Over time I’ll try to fix the most egregious design disruptions in the archives. But to be honest I’ve got so much updating of real information to do, that it’s not a top priority. So unless you see something really broken looking, that’s probably not a bug to report. More a bugbear.
Finally, what didn’t we change?
The biggest is we experimented with sophisticated commenting options where you could log-in via Facebook or Twitter, or where you could reply to a specific comment, say. They all had drawbacks, so in the end we’ve stuck with what has worked for a decade.
Also we need to update the logo and perhaps the old Monevator armchair. (Can’t decide.)
Anyway, please let me know if you find anything is not working. Otherwise, set your stopwatches for 2026 when we’ll do it all again!