About a year ago we made a tough transition when we moved the classified ads from our discussion board to a dedicated system. It was a change that needed to be done, but was not without growing pains. Some of the feedback we got was expected, some was not. We’ve worked over the last year to ease the transition and we continue to do so today.
While continuing to grow and improve ProBrewer and keep it the best place for professionals in the beverage industry to communicate with one another, we’ve been testing some improvements that we are taking live today. These changes include features requested by some users of the Classified Ads system and our Supplier Directory and additional new features we are excited to take live.
Hit the link for full details.
Classified Ad Improvements
Ad Display density: One of the complaints we’ve heard from users is that there is too much info on the page to quickly browse the newly posted classified ads. We’ve helped that by creating a persistent option to show a compact listing view. This can be selected from the ‘view detail’ drop down above any classified ad list. This option will be saved if you are logged in and stay that way unless you change it back to detailed.
Quick view list / Category detail: Another request we heard from readers that were used to the discussion board version of classifieds was that they wanted a quicker way to view the latest classifieds posted in each category similar to the discussion board latest view. So we’ve updated the list of categories to allow display of the latest classified ad in each category when viewing with the detailed view. This view can be selected from the Classified Ads menu above, under Ads by Category.
New Equipment and Product Catalog: the last change we made was in response to requests we got from our commercial supplier advertising supporters. They were used to posting their equipment to the classified ads to increase product exposure. Posting to the classified ads section was included in their advertising package and they greatly valued that exposure for their products. Unfortunately there was some abuse of the system and brewing industry readers complained about the posting and reposting, equating it with spamming the classified ads. This led to limiting of our advertisers classified usage. We searched for a way to allow the commercial suppliers, whose advertising support makes this free publication possible, to make their product details visible to our community without flooding the classified ads.
To meet this need this we have created a new type of classified ad just for our commercial suppliers. This New Equipment and Product Catalog ad allows them to post the comprehensive detailed product details as they did before and make them searchable and discoverable, but not have the posts flood the latest classified ads section. These placements will be categorized the same way classified ads are, but they will remain active the entire length of the advertising package campaign. The catalog ads will also be linked directly to the company’s Probrewer supplier directory listing allowing us to link full company details and product line to each placement.
Our readers will now also have an additional control in the classified listings that allow them to view just the catalog ads, just classified ads, or the default, all ads together.
Supplier Directory Improvements
In our Supplier Directory we have streamlined the listing of companies to allow us to show more companies at once.
A verified user can become the editor of their associated company’s supplier page by clicking the “claim” button on that company page. Once they are verified and have access to the page they will also see a display of statistics for that company page and the company activity all across the ProBrewer sites. These stats will help each company see how their company page and URL are interacted with on the ProBrewer network.
We hope these changes will be beneficial to all users. We’ve got a lot more improvements coming soon, stay tuned. And as always we would love your feedback on these and other changes you want to see. Please feel free to get in touch.