Quote:
Originally Posted by Ed007Toronto
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I welcome the opportunty to look at alternative sites which may provide a better experience for those of us who like to share construction development information in our communities with like-minded forum members.
The very first thing I noticed upon visiting a few SkyriseCities pages on my Windows 10 notebook is just how much of each page is devoted to static banners, headers, footers and menus. This clutter greatly reduces the real estate devoted to the actual content I want to read and the photos and schematics I want to see. SSP may be old and outdated, but the content is foremost on my screen and easy to read. It doesn't seem to me that your site is as user-focussed as it could be. I see a need for a usability assessment.
Also, when I tried accessing the main page
https://skyrisecities.com/ on my phone (Chrome on Android 14) it simply doesn't load. Only Urban Toronto would launch (
https://toronto.skyrisecities.com/). When I clicked on the menu for another city (Calgary, Edmonton, etc) the page launch just fails with an IP address error. This doesn't bode well for a successful user experience.
I could be wrong, but it appears on the surface that SkyriseCities is a proprietary platform, meaning that it won't benefit from open source community updates as time goes on. This isn't an issue if the SysAdmins are skilled and active, but over time data security issues can creep in if they aren't constantly updating all the dependencies in the code, as per software development best-practices.
After perusing the entire site, it seems to me that SkyriseCities is more of a business than a community-run cooperative of enthusiasts, as it offers news coverage, sells services, and appears to generally profit from the community-supplied content. As such I have to wonder how much software development investment is being devoted to improving the experience of the end user, the very people who are populating the site with the content that forms the basis for this business.
Would I jump up and immediately move from SSP (with it's long history of valuable archived content) to start afresh at SkyriseCities? I think I'd need some sort of show of support that it's a better experience that the devil I know at SSP.