EMAP, the publisher behind “Digital Photo” and “Practical Photography” magazines, re-launched their photography web site this week. As a replacement to the aging, crumbling http://www.photographymags.co.uk/ site, http://www.photoanswers.co.uk/ was promised to be a first-rate development. However, this has turned out to be anything but the reality.
A combination of poor design, poor structure, and shockingly bad testing has left DP/PP’s followers sadly disappointed. Since the launch the forum has been inundated with bug reports in numbers that exceed the number of photography-related posts by an order of ten. Ranging from inaccurate post details and image upload failures to posts mysteriously disappearing, the editorial team is determined to ignore members’ complaints and instead is choosing to make hot-fixes to the site while it’s live.
More than a week’s worth of data has been lost during the transition from old to new. Losing data while launching a new site is evidence of critical failures in the planning and development stages. A thread entitled “New Forum Issues” already runs to 55 posts, all of which complain about the state of the new site.
So, what’s wrong?
- Members of the moderation team are copying posts from the old forum in to the new site, meaning that the flow of the thread is lost and the members who made the posts are no longer credited. It also has an impact on how the topics are displayed – the forum index will show that a subject has zero replies, even though the pasted messages might run to ten or twenty responses.
- You can’t quote messages to which you’re replying.
- The search engine doesn’t work, nor do the quick links to recent posts.
- You have to type a subject for every message you post, even when replying.
- Once you’re in a post there’s no bread-crumb navigation through the forum.
- Replies often take a couple of hours to appear, even though the post count shows that the reply is there.
- While the forum supports private messaging, it doesn’t store sent messages.
The list goes on. And on. And on.
The whole release smacks of amateurism and laziness. For an organisation the size of EMAP you’d expect better, but the development team that’s put the site together ought to be feeling thoroughly ashemed of themselves while they hand a sackful of cash back to EMAP.
Andrew James, Practical Photography’s editor, is adamant that the code had been tested and opened to a select group of individuals before being released to the public, but this is clearly not the case.
In response to a PM I sent he said, “I can assure you a rigorous testing procedure was taken before release but there are just some things that don’t behave they way they should.”
This is inexcusable. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for code that’s passed through test to fail in a live environment to the degree that the DP/PP release has.
While the front-end content has been extended to include tutorials, reviews and videos, it offers nothing new over sites such as strobist.com or Flickr. Strobist, the place to go for help and advice on using speedlights, flashguns, and other off-camera lighting, is built on Blogspot. It just works, and it’s paid for by one man and has a merry band of talented contributors. EMAP is a massive organisation with international distribution, and has failed miserably to produce a high quality product.
steve1967, a very skilled portrait photographer said in the old forum, “about to leave for good sent an email today which was ignored , . reply to posts registered as there but i cant view it , images towards the gallery are wrong according to them , but well within parameters they set which in photography terns are very low in quality so sucks even deviant art or flick r allows upto 10 mb.
“cant even upload pics for my own profile or do you have to be one of th elite to do this.
“very disappointed but it doesnt matter i am only joe public and dont go in for post counting”
He’s not standing by himself on this either. The hard-core, loyal forum members are all saying the same thing. A few are still enthusiastic about the new release, especially the moderation team, but I feel that this enthusasiam will soon start to wane after the gloss dries.
“A huge effort has gone into greatly increasing the content of the site to include techniques, reviews, videos, galleries etc… and I think this content – especially the video side – is a very crucial part of the package.”
Andrew, this content is already available as part of the magazine, so it’s a very small step to publishing it to the web site.
While the editorial team at the magazines may well be extremely knowledgable and skilled photographers, they’ve been seriously let down by their technology guys.