New KEH website: From bad to worse?

I emailed them today about their new design and told them things are too hard to find. My main complaints...

1. There's no shopping by 'system' anymore.
2. The large pictures make it hard to find something specific. I'm usually looking at descriptions first.

Their customer service director replied immediately that they are interested in feedback. Hopefully they will make things better. He did mention that the 'classic' site will not be around for very long.

I've always been pleased with my dealings with KEH....hopefully the gear and the service doesn't change.
 
I haven't checked it out yet, but from the looks of the announcing e-mail I got, it does appear to be somewhat frivolous in design. Web page designers these days aren't out to make the best page for your navigating purposes, but to do it as easily as possible to fulfill their contract. They don't care how many clicks you have to use, or if the sorting is cockeyed. They screw around, dragging out the process, then rush to get the product to the site owner without fully testing it for functionality across all platforms. Most of them even ignore some platforms, so they don't have to deal with it. Flickr and Goodwill have shown what happens when you let someone loose on your web page that doesn't give a crap about the end user.:bang:

PF
 
I used to blame management but now I blame the web developers.

I and one of the graphic artists where I work managed to put together a decent site from renting a server to demoing it in less than a day's worth of time. I am not a developer, and have zero training in compsci.

So why is it, that with weeks and 10s of thousands of dollars, so many sites redo their look with utter garbage? KEH now joins flickr and youtube in the "site I use a lot but hate hate hate" list.
 
ugh, it takes more clicks to get where i want. the only good thing i noticed about the new site is being able to filter things by condition, but even that doesn't work right. it should let you set a minimum and/or select multiple options before having the page automatically reload, which just gets in the way.

anyhow, i haven't gotten anything on keh for a while. they've been running low on inventory, and they don't have much stuff in good condition. no big loss for me.
 
They could have made it mobile responsive and updated the styles without doing this to it. But the previous comment about not being able to order a particular item is disturbing. If customer service has altered, then I really do not care what the site looks like as I won't bother going there.
 
Do I really have to go through a lot of EFS lenses when looking for an FD lens?

Yes this was exactly my first experience too. The old site looked pretty dated but it worked a lot better than this one for the way I logically like to search.
 
I used to blame management but now I blame the web developers. I and one of the graphic artists where I work managed to put together a decent site from renting a server to demoing it in less than a day's worth of time. I am not a developer, and have zero training in compsci. So why is it, that with weeks and 10s of thousands of dollars, so many sites redo their look with utter garbage? KEH now joins flickr and youtube in the "site I use a lot but hate hate hate" list.

Unfortunately it's a common misconception that website design has anything to do with Computer Science.

You need a graphic designer, Ui and UX people. I'm a Software Developer but know better than to try to design a website!
 
Unfortunately it's a common misconception that website design has anything to do with Computer Science. You need a graphic designer, Ui and UX people. I'm a Software Developer but know better than to try to design a website!

That's said, having just used thee search, they could clearly have used a decent Sof Dev too!
 
Search modules now days are designed to return spurious results in order to give the buyer an incentive to impulse buy. It sucks, but it's a popular marketing ploy most effectively used at Walmart. That's why their aisle stocking makes no sense. Click on "Search for similar items" on eBay, and you might get one thing in a hundred that matches the original item.

PF
 
Unfortunately it's a common misconception that website design has anything to do with Computer Science.

You need a graphic designer, Ui and UX people. I'm a Software Developer but know better than to try to design a website!

Point taken, but the UI and UX people are going to make nice wireframes/comps, and that's it - you still need someone to implement the interface and integrate with a database, plus deploy it on an adequate provider.

But yes, the new KEH site is pretty bad. No longer looks like it came from the 1990's but still works that way.

Randy
 
Do I really have to go through a lot of EFS lenses when looking for an FD lens?

Try to use the website like this:

Search for "Canon FD" (the search box is on the top of the page).

Then use the list of data filters (check-boxes) on the left-side to narrow down the result. No EF lens to go through this way.

eBay has been doing this for years and Keh is following suit.

The upgrade makes sense to me, if I stop using it like a website from the 2000.
 
Change is never easy to get accepted, so there will most likely more people who complains than not.

However, I do feel that there should be sub-format or "system"-based categorization like before since a lot of what KEH sells is used older equipments that format-based category is too broad of classification.
 
Change is never easy to get accepted, so there will most likely more people who complains than not.

However, I do feel that there should be sub-format or "system"-based categorization like before since a lot of what KEH sells is used older equipments that format-based category is too broad of classification.

I only hear large numbers of complaints when things get worse.

And funny, I hear people saying that that are responsible for awful changes so I think there may be some correlation.
 
Try to use the website like this:

Search for "Canon FD" (the search box is on the top of the page).

Then use the list of data filters (check-boxes) on the left-side to narrow down the result. No EF lens to go through this way.

eBay has been doing this for years and Keh is following suit.

The upgrade makes sense to me, if I stop using it like a website from the 2000.

Yeah, the problem with the new KEH site is that the initial search is so terrible. I posted earlier that I had something like 1800 hits for a simple 85mm nikon search and a lot of the results were just 100% wrong. At least searching on ebay gives you a list of *relevant* results on the first try without having to use additional filters.
 
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