Redesigning the Vodacome 4 Me homepage

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fergus

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I use the vodacom4me web site to send free text messages. The current implementation is a bloated, waste of bandwidth as far as I'm concerned. It very slow and annoying and all I want to do is send an sms. With that in mind here is my suggestion for a perfect vodacom4me homepage.

Screen 1

Username: <text_input />
Password: <pass_input />
<checkbox /> Remember me?
<button>Login</button>

Screen 2

Recipient(s): <text_input />
Message: <textarea />
<button>Send</button>

Thats it!

Please redesign or else I'll resort to greasemonkey to get my way :)
 
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I agree.

I counted the other day and there seems to be around 60 elements that needs to be downloaded.

It is a good example of how not to do HTML for South Africa. Restrictions courtesy of Telkom.
 
The site design is good, but the optimisation isn't - the server is also very slow.
The total file load of the page is 268k

This is fine for a broadband saturated country, like the UK, but for South Africa it's 168k too big.

The original designers did a good job of optimising, however, whoever maintains and manages the site doesn't seem to know when it's a good time to use a JPEG or a GIF or how to optimise those graphics.

They are also using the HierMenus script, which is far too bloated. They are only using a single level of menu structure and just the javascript weighs in at 60k !

You could do exactly the same menu system using simple CSS which would be around 5k in filesize.

So, optimise the graphics and chuck out the HierMenus and shave 168k of the site.
 
bb_matt, agreed with your comments on optimisation but I'm also talking about the content. Out of hundreds of links on the pages all I want to do is send a simple sms. I couldn't care less about the rest. I need a vodacom4me 'lite'.
 
fergus said:
I use the vodacom4me web site to send free text messages. The current implementation is a bloated, waste of bandwidth as far as I'm concerned. It very slow and annoying and all I want to do is send an sms. With that in mind here is my suggestion for a perfect vodacom4me homepage.

Please redesign or else I'll resort to greasemonkey to get my way :)
Click to expand...

Have passed all the comments to the WEB developers. Would not want fergus to grease the monkey....

What I do with the SMS page is to permanently leave it open.
 
there site is just a big blur to me, way to much stuff all arround, they count have like a JUST sms zone, where there is little or no adverts etc, will make life alot easier, mtn have got there website built a bit better than voda.
 
vodacom3g said:
What I do with the SMS page is to permanently leave it open.
Click to expand...
Thats a work around and shouldn't be necessary. Its not too difficult to use cookies to remember a user.

vodacom3g said:
Would not want fergus to grease the monkey....
Click to expand...
You, sir, have a dirty mind ;)

Greasemonkey is a firefox extension that allows authoring of 'user scripts' to modifiy a specific sites behaviour / appearance, fix bugs and usability issues or non standard code, etc in the browser using JavaScript. Similar to the user css concept in Firefox / Opera but just much more powerful.

Here's a better description:
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a web site more readable or more usable. You can fix rendering bugs that the site owner can't be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. You can even automatically retrieve data from other sites to make two sites more interconnected.
Click to expand...

Heres a list of some scripts available and a book by Mark Pilgrim (Dive Into Mark blog) called Dive Into Greasemonkey.

If you're a web designer / developer you should definitely have this on your radar.
 
bb_matt said:
The site design is good, but the optimisation isn't - the server is also very slow.
The total file load of the page is 268k
Click to expand...

Why worry? You can still download this page 11737.79104477612 times before you exceed the 3GB cap. :-)

Vodacom can save a substantial amount of bandwidth by reducing the page size to less than 100k.

In fact, Vodacom, daughter of Telkom, is guilty of abusing bandwidth!
 
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rebel said:
Then the session times out and you have to login again :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Agree, but at least most is cached.

I've passed on all comments and asked, specifically, for light-weight versions of the SMS and Usage pages. Last one already developed, waiting for some back-end stuff.
 
vodacom3g said:
I've passed on all comments and asked, specifically, for light-weight versions of the SMS and Usage pages. Last one already developed, waiting for some back-end stuff.
Click to expand...

Tell me where to send the invoice.
I'm serious.
 
Good to see vodacom is actually doing something about this. The site redesign is looking much better so far (don't stop yet, keep going).

I'm still getting odd errors with the site though sending sms's and during login. The problem was brought up recently (can't find the link though, the search gods are not smiling on me today). Whats odd (read slightly annoying) though is on the old site when this happened, i clicked refresh, got prompted to resubmit post data and it most of the time went through. Now clicking refresh, saying yes to the resubmit post data, takes me to the main page with no sms sent :(

Vodacom3g: I haven't checked the page size but if it is still big-ish why not get your web developers to put the page through tidyhtml first (if possible)?
 
Nice to read these comments :)

I've never really had a problem with the vodacom site though... I mean I use the SMS page but I also play around with the other features. Stuff like the balance checker and contract info is useful when you're arbing around.

I agree that the site is fairly bloated though. Perhaps the idea of a lite and total site would be a good one.
 
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