Sunday, December 20, 2009

Major CardShark Site Upgrade

First off, thanks to all our loyal customers for years of patronage. CardShark is in its ninth year, and its success is directly related to loyal users like you!
We often get requests for new features and small improvements to the site which we take very seriously but are frequently slow to move on. For this we apologize. One of the big problems is that our website was built in 2000 and the foundation is starting to show signs of age. You know that person on your block that never mows their lawn, never puts a fresh coat of paint on their house or never gets their sidewalk repaired? Well, we don't want to be that neighbor.  We know our pages aren't all pretty CSS, we still use the occasional font tag, and the usability of the site leaves much to be desired.

Very shortly we will be introducing CardShark version 3.0 to address these issues and more. This upgrade will make it much easier in the future to build new tools for the site and APIs so our users can interact with the site exciting new ways. It will help us make bug fixes and add small user requested features quite easily. We will also be using this change to upgrade to new and improved servers for more capacity and speed. Most importantly the new site provides us with a foundation to expand.

The new site has been recoded with an eye towards better design and usability. Improvements include paging, sorting and better searching of all tables. The new code base is object-oriented and has a slick new CSS design. Our card detail pages now roll up similar items and let you select them in quantity, making it much easier to purchase multiple cards. We have thrown in a little ajax to make the site more fluid, and it is built for better performance and security.
We are adding some new features. A seller profile page and store front that will give sellers an opportunity to do some self promotion. We are also attempting to simplify our shipping charges. In addition, there will be a slight increase in these fees to keep up with the recent postal increases. There will also be an option for buyers to purchase delivery confirmation.

With any major change, there will be a few hiccups. New passwords will be required for enhanced security. We will be getting much tougher about member policies. Everyone will need to have a valid working email to use the site. The card notes field will have to be directly related to an item; promotional messages will no longer be allowed. Finally, we will institute a new policy that will put your inventory on vacation if you haven't logged in for a while. If you haven't made a sale in a year, your inventory will be deleted. Sellers will receive notifications via email if any of these things are going to happen so don't worry. Everyone should keep an eye on this blog for more specific details and notifications of future policy changes.

We know this update has been a long time coming, and we thank all of you for your patience. Our next goal is to get a working version of the site up for beta testing. We are about 95% done with the programming and will be extending a BETA invitation to some of our top users shortly. If you would like to participate, please let us know as well.

From all of us at Cardshark.com we wish you a Happy Holidays and look forward to launching the new site to you in early 2010.


All of us at CardShark.com

3 comments:

  1. Hey, while you're at it, how about a promotion to become a fan on Facebook?

    I became a fan of "All Magic Cards.com" not because I liked them (never used them), but because they offered to auto-enter me into a raffle while I remained their fan.

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  2. What is the story on the upgrade? Things rolling along?

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  3. @Michael,

    Well in classic CardShark fashion we are taking our sweet time. The short answer is we ran into a problem around the holidays and then vacations and what not and things got pushed back. We have been hard at work again though and I would say we are 1 week out from the preliminary BETA and probably a few weeks before everyone gets access to it.

    Our goal is to have the new site up in about a month from now which will involve a bit of downtime. We will be doing a series of blog posts in the near future talking about some of the changes that will be coming up.

    Our apologies to all our users for the long delay. This project is just huge and we have decided to just release phase 1 and worry about the rest after that. Dealing with small projects will be a lot more productive then trying to make the big one perfect.

    Thanks for your comment.

    Matthew @ CardShark

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