The new TradeMe layout in my eyes

TradeMe launched their site last week, the first impression to me was neat and clean looks like a modern website, but I still don't like its color combo strong blue and strong yellow. Secondly the loading speed is even more faster. (Maybe I am using Firefox3.5 ^_^)

I am really interested in people's feedbacks on the redesign, so I roughly went through trademe users comments about new layout, not surprisingly about 95% users hate it. Just like we launched the third generation of Stuff.co.nz in March, it again has proved that People hate changes! From Stuff.co.nz's experience, what I can say is keep eyes on what users do and react to that rather than paying too much attention on what they say they are going to do.

For me as a developer, there are things about this new design that I think are noteworthy,

1. The fixed width (1020px) canvas makes me concentrate on the content, significantly easier to scan the listings.
2. Finally, TradeMe replaced the endless nested <table> tags with nested <ul> for listings.
3. Clean and optimized CSS, CSS Sprite in use.

Surprisingly, I found this HTML comment on the top of the Trade Me homepage:
<!-- If you're looking at our HTML source, you're exactly the personwho should send us your resume. View current vacancies at http://www.trademe.co.nz/careers -->

Should I send? ^_&

Lastly, TradeMe is already 10 years old since it launched in 1999, if you are interested, you can review its footprints at Rowan Simpson's blog.

Happy 10th birthday to Trademe

Trademe.co.nz, the most popular New Zealand made website  turns 10 years old today. New Zealand entrepreneur Sam Morgan founded the site in 1999, and after some years of overall dramatic growth sold it to Fairfax Media in 2006 for NZ$750 million.

TradeMe is the second most visited in New Zealand after Google.co.nz, and is ranked 1095th globally according to Alexa. 

Site Statistics from Trademe

People online (average)	70,000
No. of active members (live)	2,205,428
No. of current listings (live)	1,235,157
Average time spent on the site*	16 minutes
Number of people who visit each month**	4,682,800
Average number of people who visit each day**	488,000
Busiest day of the week*	Monday
Busiest hour of the day*	9-10PM

eBay tried to enter the New Zealand market in 2001, but had little success. TradeMe has remained the major Internet-auction site in New Zealand, with both international and smaller national competitors gaining relatively little market penetration.

The results are obvious - today Trade Me has 1.19m listings in NZ and eBay Australia has just 1.16m items located in Australia. That’s right - there are more items for sale in NZ than Australia, and that’s a country with well over five times NZ’s population.

Happy birthday to Trademe, wish you continue to succeed!

TradeMe Christmas logos

Christmas is getting near all of us, New Zealand's web giant TradeMe has launched its Christmas doodle logos. Trademe.co.nz is the NZ second busiest website just right after google.co.nz

Below is some stats of trademe.co.nz

No. of active members (live)	2,128,822
Average time spent on the site	14 minutes
Number of people who visit each month	4,521,509
Average number of people who visit each day	489,613

Google's Street View comes to Trade Me

Smaps was offically closed down by TradeMe yesterday and replaced it with Google Maps. Trademe is pretty fast to enhance the Google Maps's new feature street view released in New Zealand today.

The switch lets users of TradeMe Property and its travel accommodation site Travelbug make the most of Google's new Street View programme. Street View is a unique Google Maps feature that allows users of the online software to view 360-degree photographs of the surroundings from a street level. The incorporation of Google's Street View should definitely make house or holiday hunting easier.

Good Bye Smaps

TradeMe will shut down its popular online mapping site Smaps at the end of the month. It will now use Google Maps on its sub-sites, including Travelbug and TradeMe Property.

That is really a pity.

ProjectX Limited , the online mapping company who developed Smaps and ZoomIn ,  shut down its ZMS and switched ZoomIn.co.nz running on Google maps since 1th Sept this year. Now, TradeMe just simply dumps the site and gives up the 45 per cent of the market share of domestic traffic.They pretty much just accept that they were unlikely to beat Google at this game.

I am just feeling bad about it as I made some effort on Smaps during my time at ProjectX.

Halloween logos 2008

Today is Halloween, Google releases its Halloween logo all over the world. New Zealand's top 1 auction website www.trademe.co.nz also has its own logo to celebrate Halloween.

Halloween (or Hallowe’en) is an international holiday celebrated on October 31.

Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, ghost tours, bonfires, costume parties, visiting haunted attractions, carving jack-o'-lanterns, reading scary stories, and watching horror movies. Irish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century. Halloween is celebrated in several countries of the Western world, most commonly in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Japan, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and at times in parts of Australia.

Description from wikipedia

2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000