If you are a regular visitor to the site you may well notice a few small changes to the site this morning. Namely that it is on a completely new platform, with a completely new look and a completely new forum! It is UK Whitegoods, just better.
The upgrades were performed through the night so as to minimise downtimes but there will be some disruption to normal operation over the next few days at least while we get all the systems back online.
We’ve been on the same platform now since 2003 and, frankly we fancied doing a bit of redecorating. But, more than that it allows us to access a ton of new features and to develop a number of things that we want the site to be able to do which is not possible on the current platform.
The new menus and navigation should make relevant information easier to locate by section as, there is rather a lot of information on here about appliances.
The forums will be back online in the small hours of this morning with the rest of the site and, again, it’s a completely new platform with a ton of new features.
But we’re afraid that it isn’t all good news as there are some things that we simply cannot put right or make work on the new system.
Features That May Be Lost (For A While At Least)
There will be some things that will no longer function, repairs@ being the main one it will be down indefinitely while we completely redesign the module for the new platform.
The downloads section will be unavailable for a while as we organise menus and so on as we’ve just not had the time to do everything that we wanted and to meet the deadlines and, in fact, we’re behind anyway as this upgrade was originally slated to happen in 2008.
The parts and help desk function moves over to the online store completely.
The photo gallery will be unavailable until a new component is installed and, we manage to recover as much as we can from the old gallery.
The reviews section is sadly not recoverable but we should be launching a new reviews section in coming months.
In short, there’s a few things that will disappear at least for a while. Most of them will be back though.
Forum Indexing
This is completely unavoidable and a pain that we all have to live with for a a day or so.
However, here’s the good news…
The search function will be so, so much better and will actually work once that completes, that’s why it all has to be indexed.
Problems & Login Issues
If you encounter any errors or problems please read this article before contacting us so we can help you as much as possible.
We are also aware of the articles having some errors where the import routine has not read hyphens, apostrophises and some other characters correctly. We are working our way through the articles and updating these errors as well as the embedded links but, with so much content on the site we expect that this will take some weeks to complete fully.
Images in the articles section should be coming back online this weekend.
The Future
We have a few ideas on what we want to do with the site, how we want to drive it forward for the future and with this upgrade we get access to a host of tools and functionality that we simply could never have had with the old platform.
Things like video, audio, scripts and so on are all now possible and these simply were not possible to use for the most part on the old platform. In order to stay up to date we had no choice but to change the site completely and we apologise for any inconvenience that may cause our users but we hope you understand why it had to be done.
But, this year, look out for a completely redesigned repairs@ which will also carry a new name, more features, more interactive stuff and more.
In the meantime, thank you all for your patience and understanding while we perform all these upgrades.