SLBoutique.com v2.0 is here!

Greetings!

I'm very proud to announce that the new version of SLBoutique.com has been launched. First off, I'd like to explain the two major changes we've put into place.

(1) The entire search has be re-written to use the Lucene Search Engine which will vastly improve the results provided. The original search engine was written in about 20 minutes by me, and it has long been overdue for a major overhaul. The results returned are now ranked by a scoring system, and should yield much better results than the former search which just did a straight string comparison on the name and description fields. As part of this change, we've dropped our categories in favor of tags. Tags (or "keywords" are much more beneficial for searching, since you're not limited to one and can actually be descriptive about your product. The more and better tags you use, the easier it will be for people to find your products! Our search works a lot more like Google does now, which should yield much better results.

(2) As we've grown over the past year and a half, many new features have been added. Many of them didn't feel like they quite "fit" in an area properly, so we've re-designed the entire web site to incorporate the new features. We've also switched from the traditional Flipper purple color scheme to the nice Electric Sheep Company shade of blue (I'm sure Cristiano will be happy about that, hehe).

There are numerous other more minor changes - like the rotating tips, and the dynamic left navigation. We're continuing to tweak a few things here and there, but we hope this major revamp is pleasing to all of you!

I want to thank the SLBoutique.com team for all of their hard work: Christian Westbrook for the amazing work on the search engine, Ryan Buskirk for implementing the design, Amanda for the wonderful design itself (and Cory for her input as well), and the entire Electric Sheep Company team for all the thought that went into the redesign process. It is an honor to be working with such a talented team, and really nice to no longer be a one-man show! Most importantly, I want to thanks everyone who uses the site: buyers, sellers and surfers! You've turned it into an amazing community, and without you, there would be no content.

Warmest regards,

FlipperPA Peregrine

aww flip your my hero, thanks my fine feathered friend!

Looks good. Although the side menus seem glitchy with Firefox. I only see one option under each one.

Looks great, Flip. Takes a little getting used to if you're expecting the old site, but it's much better.

My only greivance so far is that the links to view images from the seller's page aren't working for me, but I often have trouble with java stuff like that on my end. I assume it's something misconfigured in my firewall.

Awesome, Flipper! I like the new design quite a bit, great job.

h00t!

Looks great, guys

Looks fantastic Flip!

Couple of things: Dresses aren't clothes?

And Dressers are being pulled up when you click on dresses. Amusing actually.

Thanks for the kind words and reporting the glitches. I'll make sure my team gets to see them! We did our best to test it, but there's a big difference between 10 people using it and 10,000.

Thanks again!

-Flip

As much as I would like to say I love it... I don't.

I can't find anything.

I look for shorts, and get everything from actual shorts to short hair to anything anyone felt like putting Short on.

I far, far preferred having real Categories.

I like the overall look, but I miss the categories too. I looked at the sidebar and saw "orange". .....It's nice that a lot of people like orange, but it seems.... silly, to have that as -BAM- right there for browsing pleasure. I understand the idea behind it, but maybe it would be better for that stuff to be at the bottom, and to have the plain old categories menu above all the tabs. Best of both worlds.

I'll mention these comments to the team and we'll see what we can do.

Regards,

-Flip

I LOVE the new site. One thing I don't like is how the menus on the left only bring up links to the Popular, Recent Item, etc. I really liked clicking on those and seeing all the products that fell into those lists.



Try being more specific when looking for shorts. This system is great when looking for specific items.

Looks great Flip but 'Buy item now' gets me a blank .php page on Firefox ?!

Another voice for returning the categories.

Everything you have added looks great but there is no reason to remove stuff that already worked for some of us (categories).

Also, personally, I am one of those customers (and I don't think I am alone), that is never ever ever interested in "what's hot" or what's currently popular. I understand why retailers do that, but I personally hate having that shoved in my face. It should be an option only. I would much rather see a splash screen (or nothing at all) than to be faced with the "latest additions" or, "what's hot" every-time I visit the site.

Perhaps a preference setting that I can set to choose what I see on the main page when I log in?

While I am at it... a big pet peeve of mine is search engines that think for you instead of letting you specify what you want.

All the searches I did returned the correct results, but also tagged a lot of "fuzzy" returns on the end. So instead of getting just a single page that matched my query, I get three pages, the second and third being full of things with very similar spellings to what I am searching for just in case I am so dumb as to spell it wrong.

This is all meant as constructive criticism of course, and in case I didn't mention it strongly enough the site looks great! and responds quickly and slickly to the mouse. Very well done overall.

I'm not interested in "what's hot" because I want it. If fact, I'm not much of a shopper at all. It's just interesting to me to see them.

Oh, and I'm glad you got rid of the purple

How specific should someone have to be to find a pair of mens pants, or shorts, or to browse through dresses without having to climb over furniture and tattoos?

The system is either badly designed and counter-intuitive, or it isn't working right.

So far I've gotten 6 messages from people unable to find stuff I just listed on the forums this morning.

I like the new look, but sorry to say the new search method is beyond awful.

I enter "female skin" in the search box, and this is what i get in order of relevance:

* Horse in a Box - Female
* 7 different female shapes
* "industrial trash... industrial textures!" <-- whatever it is
* female hobgoblin avatar
* "Jelly Inc. Welcome to SL-female, gift box filled with things to help any nooblet"
* about dozen 'mature furry skins'
* green dragon avatar

... etc and so on. on top of it there's no clear way to quickly sort the results by anything but this completely broken search score.

And no, i don't see how i can "be more specific in my search" when i actually want to browse whole collection of female skins. putting "female skin and nothing but" doesn't seem to work

Would suggest to revise the search engine so it relies just on item tags which in turn are by default converted from category name the item was originally in... but suspect it's kinda too late for that.

Are you using the tags? Applying tags that will allow customers to find your item? Things like colors, male/female, type (halter, tank, shorts, capris, etc). Being specific with your tags will help.

Give people time to get their tags in order. Some default tags were applied but they aren't specific themselfs. Give it a week or so for creaters to fix their tags.

I looked under hot gadgets and came up with lace dresses.

I have over 1300 items listed on SLB. If anyone wants to go back over all of it and hand-type in tags, be my guest. I would have thought the old categories and default tags would have worked, but it seems not.

It won't make difference when the search engine looks for keywords in item names and descriptions too. That's why "horse in box (female)" with "skin included" lands in results for "female skins".

And yes i suppose this is 'technically correct' search result but why on earth does it score higher than properly tagged 'female skin' that's actually exactly that, and nothing but?

Also, 'giving it a week' won't help with products put on sale months ago by people who are no longer even around, and i suspect there's quite a few of them...

One thing that I am finding that is annoying is that the searches are bringing up results that kind of match the key word. When I typed in gadget it brought up that along with Gaudete and Goddes, etc....THAT I think should be fixed. I think that's also why when I looked for female board shorts it brought up male board shorts first.

Perhaps they should prioritize where it looks for keywords first. Like Tags then Name then Description?

Yup, or even better allow the person who's doing the search to override the defaults, and decide what they want to include and with what importance. This whole 'think for dumb user who don't really know what they want' thing might work for Google if just due to sheer amount of users they get that allow them to work out nicely what's relevant and what isn't, but for SLB it's sadly kinda 'meh' at least at the moment ;.;

Someone nudge me if they go back to proper categories. Until then, I'm giving up.