This has nothing to do with cars, but a question. Who the heck changed the Car Talk website? It is horrible, one of the worst I have ever seen.
I agree 100%. Just about unusable…
For the bast decade or so, companies have been slowly making a transition. In the first part, they created tablet-friendly versions of their websites for accessing on tablets and cell phones, but they also kept their computer-friendly websites. Now a lot of companies are doing away with their old complicated computer-friendly website designs in favor of the simpler tablet-friendly designs for all users. This trend is why the latest versions of Windows are tablet-friendly.
That appears to be what CT is doing now.
I don’t see this at all, for major websites, like Amazon, CNN, Fidelity, Expedia, Hotels, etc. I think it’s a cop-out.
I, for one, like it. If you want to see a website gone bad, check out the This Old House advice website. 35 categories, the “latest posts” link is gone. The link to the advice forum has been removed from the main page. ALL the regulars have left for other sites and anyone leaving a question now will likely not get an answer, at least not from someone who actually knows what they are talking about.
https://advice.thisoldhouse.com/forum.php
Without that link, finding this site would be very difficult.
I hardly watch them anymore. I’m just not interested in remodeling a 100 year old farm house for $400,000. I used to subscribe to the magazine too but kitchen remodels aren’t my thing. Certainly better than Bob Vila ever was but I miss Norm’s work shop-even though the equipment was industrial quality.
2 Likes
I like it, but then again, I’m using a tablet.
Are you speaking of the most recent re-design that occurred over the past couple of weeks, with all the “continue to site” clicks you need to click on before you can sign in? I’ll grant that change is somewhat annoying, and seems to prevent viewing what used to be the main Car Talk page. I liked that page b/c it was simple to look at what all the new blog posts were about and what was new at Ray’s newspaper column and the like, and quick links to the other areas of Car Talk, like the puzzler, etc. But while a little annoying, it doesn’t really affect using the forums that much, other than the initial sign on.
If you are referring to the changes made a while ago, last summer I think, for the most part those seem like to me they are either for the better , making the site easier to use, or worse case doesn’t really change anything in a fundamental way, benign change in other words. It did take some time to get used to, but the way it works now imo is perfectly fine for the most part.
Maybe its my memory just going but I haven’t noticed a difference this last go around.
Click on the link at the very top left, cartalk.com, quite a big difference. And not for the better.
Oh yeah, that’s a mess. All those old posts just to boost activity or something. I just keep clicking on my same old link though and its still the same. I’ll avoid the upper left or move on.
My bad, I thought you were talking about the community page, I didn’t realize that you were referring to the home page for CarTalk.com. Yeah, that one is messed up to the max.
Some of the best things on CarTalk.com have been lost. The letters from listeners contained some real classics, like the letter from Malissa, the Andy Scale, Cat flaps, College acceptance (Harvard acceptance letter?) should be front and center along with Tom’s classic rants, especially the one on education. The best is getting lost.
3 Likes
It may be an exaggeration, but it feels like the forum/website has been redesigned 10 different times in the last 2~3 years.
Just when you get used to one thing, they change/remove it, and you have to learn all over again.
Nothing against software designers but it seems like their continuous improvement program when they should just leave well enough alone.
2 Likes
When on the community site clicking on the CarTalk.com icon what you see just looks like you entered the middle of something instead of the main page.
Last week’s Puzzler answer works now but Ask Car Talk seems to have disappeared.
It’s still there, but there’s no direct link to it. You have to open up one of their recent blog posts, then there is a link to pull up all of the Ask Car Talk material. One thing I actually liked from the old format was how it was easier to get to a listing of all of the blogs…That is definitely something they should fix with the new page.
Huh?
Why are you signing out when exiting this site?
I never sign out, and I typically only have to sign in again–perhaps–every few months if I accidentally deleted the cookies for his site. If you never sign out, you rarely need to sign-in again.
It’s a thing peculiar to my computer. It automatically terminates any unused open webpages. Security software thing probably.