Why have you guys changed the site ?

Functionally, the site remains very largely the same. However the left hand menu is gone and the number of colours reduced.

There are several reasons why we decided to make some alterations to moveflat and the software on which it runs. Some of the reasons were imposed on us, others are things we've been considering for some time. We'll go through these below.

One reason is that computer screens are getting wider rather than taller and this was making the site look very 'stretched' so we went for a fixed width page. A second was that we considered the appearance of the site was becoming a little dated and quite substantially at odds with standard practice. In fact we used to re-touch the site quite regularly, but for some reason haven't done this for some time. There was a time when this slightly untidy appearance conveyed an atmosphere of 'home-spun', but we feel that this time has passed. We have also substanially reduced the number of links: for example four links that let you change or stop your ad via a password have been replaced with the standard 'Login' common to most web sites. 'De-cluttering' is something that sites have to do from time to time in order not to intimidate new visitors, but believe us it isn't without pain.

We consulted quite widely using quite an expensive web design firm (although in the end we rejected their substantive proposal.) We were however persuaded by the need for a less cluttered design that didn't confound new users of the site in the way the old one definitely did. We have adopted a simple (and we think) clean style that emphasises the properties that are being advertised, rather than the site itself.

Another reason we have made changes is that we wish to move away from Microsoft servers and instead adopt Apache servers running on Ubuntu Linux (no matter at all if this means nothing to you !) This means that the site is able to run on a minimal amount of electricity in a reliable way which is not vulnerable to attack on the scale that is apparent with Microsoft software. This concludes a transition of code that has been going on for about two years.

There are several significant new features to the site that the MoveFlat founder, Julian, has been lobbying to introduce for quite some while now. These 'elevate' the user of the site into a much more interactive role in using quite sophisticated search tools and (possibly) a new 'virtual' (and very knowledgeable) Great Aunt who (of course) has all the answers about finding somewhere to live.

We realised quite early on that this wasn't going to be possible using the existing platform and that esssentially MoveFlat would have to re-written from the bottom up in order to accommodate such ambitions. The result is the site that you are now using and we anticipate some glitches to start with. Two major new features will follow on quite quickly however, as once the new platform is stable, we can implement these quite quickly.

If you have been using moveflat for a while you will be aware that we spend a lot of time and attention on encouraging people to describe their properties accurately. Nevertheless the geographic location of some properties is still not described as accurately as we would like.

We've been thinking about this for some time and how we might discourage this practice on our site. In the end we have decided that describing a location by its proximity to the Tube stations is the most reliable and useful description. We have automated this using small schematic maps rather than rely on 'optimistic' data from advertisers.

This is a natural progression from the location maps that we employ widely across the site. Future developments that we have in the 'pipeline' will build heavily on this new facility in order to facilitate quite sophisticated (and useful) searches.

There will be teething problems with the new software, but we hope they will be few as we have spent many weeks and a lot of care writing the new code. We hope naturally that it will cause little disruption.

The new features won't be available straightaway but without sounding too cliched we're quite 'excited' about what we will introduce over the next couple of months.

We welcome feedback on the new site BUT before you fire something off, please be sensitive to the fact that the site remains (functionally) very largely the same. We'll doubtless get the usual mutterings from No. 34, Withering Heights via unrespondable e-mail addresses (which we'll ignore as usual) but we are interested in what you do and don't like please.