Engineering Travel,

I only quoted what was posted on the ihg UK website on the morning of 8th April 2020 at 07:20hrs (BST).

The info I posted was (and still is) correct as at 06:00hrs 9th April 2020 (BST).

I am not after any favours (or favors in your lexicon).

I don't have a website, nor do I offer credit cards?

Sorry, but I cannot understand why you have quoted my post with your rather strange response.

Barney.

HFP is going down the drain.

First the new layout which forgets those of us browsing from their desktop as opposed from their mobile device. Now an advertorial of the worst kind on top of the home page.

i'm not a huge fan of their new layout (and i read on desktop as well) - but i don't think it's that bad !

isn't it easy enough to spot the advertorial content (presume it was the IHG post which offended you) and skip it ?

I meant the Marriott one.

I'm looking at the headline of the current first blog entry "MASSIVE AVIOS SALE – 50% off ALL long-haul flights, 25% off short-haul (and works with a 241)" vs the headline of the second entry "'WELCOME TO WONDER': We launch a week of competitions and offers with Marriott Bonvoy".

At first glance, I didn't notice the second one is an advertorial while the first one isn't. There is no distinction layout-wise. Only on second inspection I noticed the subtitle "Today we are launching 'Week of Wonders', a week (actually 9 days!) of competitions and promotions sponsored by Marriott Bonvoy." Of course, at that point it had become obvious to me the second one is an advertorial.

What don't you like about the desktop new look? We actually designed it FOR desktop, because there isn't much you can do with mobile layouts anyway and historically most readers access it from work on desktop. Our mobile penetration is far lower than internet average. I accept it works best on a 15 inch desktop screen which might be your problem.

Genuinely interested because we are fixing stuff in response to reader feedback, eg the reformatting of comments, the return of 'Latest Comments', the upcoming introduction of a dark mode etc. It is virtually the same as the old layout except that we've made it a bit more newbie friendly, it is responsive (so doesn't get lost on big screens) and the images are bigger.

Today's Marriott piece is not really advertorial. It is virtually a carbon copy of the annual article I write about each of the hotel schemes. With one obvious exception to come, the rest of the Week of Wonders content is stuff we'd have run anyway even if they hadn't booked a massive chunk of advertising. You also haven't seen the five competitions yet, which make up five of the nine articles.

We have never - ever - run an article on the site which was not written by our team and where we did not have final editorial sign-off.

As a reminder ..... excluding myself, Head for Points provides three people with a job. No-one had their salary or hours reduced during covid, no-one was put on furlough. We have continued to pay everyone despite an 80% collapse in revenue. The site remains free to all with no paywall or subscription options. Even October, with a couple of major sponsored deals, we will be 50% down on last year despite page views being up.

Hi Raffles,

I understand you are the HFP boss. Glad to see you are following this thread. As you're asking, let me try to be more specific.

Positive:

I think the new layout is optically pretty. Clean and modern feel. No clutter, search button is easy to find, as are the different sections such as the Avios tutorials.

Negative:

I just think screen real estate isn't utilized efficiently. Perhaps you are right, I am not your average user as my 25" QHD Dell monitor might be slightly bigger than what most people browse on. But that's where my "this site must be optimized for mobile" criticism stems from. Only three articles/headlines fit on my browser window. And I'm using slightly over half the width of my monitor and the ENTIRE height (I even have the Windows taskbar on auto-hide).

There is also under-utilization of my browser window. About 30% of the page is nothing but white space. I admit that may be an artefact of me running browser add-ons such as NoScript and uBlock Origin which may block ads usually appearing in that space. And that's fair game given the frequently very high quality of the content on HFP. **

Two other minor things: I find the credit card offers and such (before the grey background) slightly disturbing. They somewhat break the flow of blog entries. Perhaps I'd prefer them at the bottom or something. Lastly, the "OLDER" button which takes you to page 2 is a tad small.

---

** To my defense as I outed myself as somebody who actively blocks all ways in which you make money with the site (NoScript catches reflinking, too). For one, I feel somewhat in the right of "arming" myself in defense vs the operators of web sites which for decades have gone ballistic with analytics, pop-up ads and so on. For another, I am not opposed to paying for high-quality editorial content. I do have subscriptions to several sites (NYT.com...). Too bad this micro-payment thingy for blogs and such never really took off. I'm not based in the UK. Consequently, I don't visit HFP every day. But I would pay some nominal amount (GBP 0.50-1.00 per month) for using the site.

Noted, thanks.

Lose the ad block and it will be a lot more colourful :-) I am guessing the ad block also strips out most of the article images since they usually have links behind them too.

In general we publish 3 articles per day, so showing 3 ‘above the fold’ works. During covid this has got more flexible but this is where the 3+3+3 home page Idea came from.

Need the grey box stuff to make money off newbies :-)

As somebody who does *not* use Ad blockers (and who uses a 13" laptop), I have the opposite complaint - I find the page too full of content / adverts ... it sort of feels like there's no space to breathe !

I also find it a little soulless compared to the old site - I miss the Eiffel Tower / Leaning Tower / Tower Bridge graphic

Maybe it's also all the white which makes it rather blinding


I usually find that after a couple of weeks, a website's new layout grows on me. But whilst I've got used to "new HfP", I've never really got comfortable with it.

I don't *hate* it (and I was defending it earlier), it's just that I still don't really enjoy it.

13 inch is tighter, I agree. That’s because the sidebar is fixed width to fit in 300 pixel ads and so the content area is scrunched up. One option is to reduce the article extract on the home page to fewer words.

I'm not sure what it is for me, but there was something about the old layout of headorpoints.com that was easier on my eyes too.

Rob - any progress on developing your own comments section into something more user friendly ?

Now the redesign is done, hopefully we can get a forum going.

Only guy wearing a jacket :)
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/airli...837144576-BsLd

Got to keep standards up :-)

Looks cooler if you watch the video with all the lifts going up and down behind me …..

More interesting is how different Gary and Joe look to their profile pics :-)

With Headforpoints there is style and substance.