We Improved Our Image Pages

After a long time of measuring, designing and research, we launched a new version of image pages today. This is a very important change for us, since image pages are the pages that show all panoramas on our site, and are responsible for about 60%-80% of traffic on our site (the exact number changes depending on various campaigns that are currently running).

Here’s what has changed:

1. More clean and light design
2. Panorama now takes the full width of the screen
3. Easier ways for sharing to social media sites (icons in top-right corner) and email (form at the bottom of the page)
4. Like/unlike button
5. A very small overview map at top and a larger area map below panorama
6. Nicer list of nearby panoramas

We are very excited about this change, the pages look much better now! What do YOU think?

Click on the image to view the example image page. The actual layout might be slightly different because we are always running various layout tests on these pages.

14 thoughts on “We Improved Our Image Pages

  1. great! far better than before!

    the only thing is that all links in the descriptions are disappeared now 😦 . some people (as me) are putting some efforts in research to collect some informations about the location which are worthwile to be known.

    keep up the good work, jeffrey!
    cheers
    thomas

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  2. I like the new layout a lot, the Google ads a little less though. I guess it will generate more revenue than the prints! How is the Google revenue shared with the members?

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  3. To point 4: I don’t like the add inside the image area, Also preserving links inside the description or, perhpas better, a box with something like “Related Links” would be fine.

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  4. Good effort !!
    But I don´t like the add inside the image area, too.
    Perhaps you can try this. Instead of “FULLSCREEN” “EMBED & SHARE” “HIDE CONTROLS”
    a continous black strip on top of the image area with
    “FULLSCREEN” “EMBED & SHARE” “HIDE CONTROLS” plus a Adsense Link unit like “(728×15) Displays up to 5 links” in order to avoid people to close the Ad.

    And the same if possible at Fullscreen.

    Also in Chrome when you Exit Fullscreen the new area of the image doesn’t work well.

    Best Regards

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  5. Thank you everybody for your comments. Keep them coming. Please be prepared that we will not implement or change everything you complain about, because we simply can’t and/or are not willing to change the website like that. However we are always listening to suggestions and ideas and if a complaint repeats too often it’s a clear sign that we really need to do something about it. Currently the main complaints about image pages are:
    1. Various user experience bugs and annoyances.
    2. We hear you loud and clear that ads in panos suck
    3. We understand the new image page layout is not optimal for super-wide displays

    Our biggest concern now is #1, small bugs that spoil user experience. For example when you go fullscreen with hidden controls the pano doesn’t take the full width of the screen (as if the map was opened). This and many other things are there due to many changes and updates we’ve accumulated over time and now the time has come to look at the code and rewrite it properly. We are actually already testing a new version, which will also change the look of all pano controls, buttons like fullscreen and share, etc. Get ready 🙂 We will launch it once we can squeeze it into our schedule of other stuff we are preparing. More on that later.

    Jan
    360 Cities

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  6. The movement of the panos is not fluid at all with Internet Explorer.
    It is not a problem with my pc because the panos in the main page, and those included in the small frame, don’t have any problems even when I watch them full screen.

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    1. Hi Claudio, there are two parts in this problem. 1. Fullscreen flash apps tend to behave better in most cases and also in this case. Are you saying that fullscreen on the imagepage performs slower than fullscreen on the main page? 2. Could you send a link to a page where a pano performs better on your computer so we can compare the settings? Thanks

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  7. I think is need to fix proportion of image area, like 2:1 or 16:9. I have notebook with widescreen and image area now is 1230×420 (too narrow) but a problem in that that I wish to buy the laptop with super-wide display and I do not wish to see a super-narrow picture. thanks!

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    1. Alex, like I mentioned above, we’ll look at changing the super-wide image, but it will still have to wait for a while. We are still at #1, fixing bugs. Sorry, we’re a very small team and things take time for us. In the meantime, do you have any tips how exactly to fix the layout of the page?

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