I have been trying to use the new website the past few days. It is not good.

I rarely write into forums, but I have spent thousands of dollars with Renderosity, so please don't ignore this. I have more than $12,000 in items in my Wishlist. and it is a functional wishlist. I have purchased nearly 10% of that wishlist just in the past few months, and I keep updating it with more items. I used to like shopping here. Now, not so much. I'm a serious hobbyist, but an awful site is just that - awful. And this incarnation of Renderosity is AWFUL!

1. Your re-design is difficult to navigate. It is slow and ponderous. When I finally do get to a page, sometimes it spins without end even though everything on the page has loaded (I tested this on several pages for an hour!). It takes too long to go from page to page. This re-design broke my stable and well-protected version of Safari, so now I have to use Firefox, which I don't like. I have no desire to upgrade my computer or my OS system to accommodate Renderosity.

2. To get to the Items list, I have to click an icon, select account, then select Items. I used to click once. Why make it more difficult?

3. The vendors seem to be hidden in one of Dante's circles of purgatory (as others have pointed out). Why would a business make it difficult to get to the vendors? Once again, it takes a trek though Hades to get to them. Why did you decide to do away with a drop-down list? It is common internet web design! It was originally designed for the benefit of users (consumers) to speed navigation, which you seem to have forgotten!

4. Getting to the Marketplace and using the Marketplace borders on insanity. It's now as bad as Daz3D's gateway page, and maybe worse. Are you in business to be pretty or to make money by selling things? I don't care about a pretty website, I care about navigating quickly and purchasing without pain. The previous design was faster and more intuitive. This version of Renderosity has suddenly become a pain.

5. The Shopping Cart is still broken and in traction. In the Wishlist, you can select multiple items to perform an action on all selected items. It would be extremely helpful if the same paradigm was used in the Cart. Currently, it is one… item… selected… at… a… time… and man, that is so annoying and time consuming. Yes, the previous web design was no better in that regard, but this was certainly no improvement. So why the re-design if it is functionally no better, and often worse?

6. There used to be navigation buttons to the left when in the Cart or the Wishlist. That was useful. Now they are gone. Why are you creating a less useful website?

7. Wow, and now you say you are going to create a TUTORIAL to school us on navigating a website? The whole idea of the World Wide Web was simplicity, and the purpose of web site design is to make it simple and intuitive, not the other way round. Please, revert to the previous design. There was nothing wrong with it (except that Cart selection thing), and it was faster. It was pretty enough.

8. When looking up something in Marketplace, the listings of items is no longer uniform, but staggered horizontally. That is hard to read, hard to follow, and I am constantly going up and down to see if I missed anything. Once again, it now takes longer to go through stuff. What was wrong with horizontal alignment? Too plain? I like plain. Simple is good. Wow, absolutely incredible design flaw.

9. And don't even get me started on the whole Prime thing, which is another issue altogether.

Look, I like Renderosity. I always have. Been here since 2003. But if this is your new design and you keep it and do not revert to the previous design, I am going to think very hard about emptying out my Wishlist to $0.00 and shopping elsewhere. Seriously.

Regards, Rubel
A loyal customer

Thank you very much for your feedback as we very much appreciate it.

I have taken note of everything you stated and will talk to the rest of the Marketplace team about your concerns and issues.

I really appreciate you taking the time to provide us with the key points of your concerns and or issues as I believe it will really help.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week and weekend!
Kristi

KristiS, I am so sorry you are having to go through this upheaval, but all of these complaints are really legitimate. Renderosity has made a real mess of a perfectly good website. Hardly any of your links work, I can't get into Prime anymore nor can I purchase anything. Do you have any idea when these issues will be resolved?

I have to agree with rubel and Nitab here - this is absolutely the worst, most poorly implemented site overhaul I have ever seen. I thought Daz's last overhaul was miserable, but this takes miserable all the way out to the far end. It is unintuitive, sloooooooow, badly organized, and the product links are not even aligned properly. Throw this piece of crap in the trash where it belongs and give us back the previous version.

Hi Nitab,

I nor the other team members are trying to downplay any of the concerns, complaints, etc. We are only human though and get frustrated that every time we get asked a question or concern and we have a response (no matter what it is), it makes it 100 times worse. We really are listening and trying to sift through all concerns, questions, and suggestions and take note of them so we can find a good solution.

I assure you that we are trying to fix the issues as thoroughly and quickly as possible as quite a few of them have already been fixed so we are making some head way.

I am not sure why you are stating you cannot get into Prime as I just logged in as you and added Prime items to the cart as well as went to check out with them and the system did not give me any issues.

Can you please tell me which browser you are using?

Thank you

Kristi, I know you guys are doing your best, but it is just frustrating that it's taking so long. I use Safari for the Mac, because I use a Mac. This morning when I went to the Market Place, I clicked on Prime -- what came up was an outfit by 3D Powerage. It isn't even in Prime as far as I know (since I haven't been able access Prime in sometime now). I hesitate to tell you this, but I'm afraid what you can access and do there in the office doesn't always reflect what we customers get. For instance, I received an email saying someone had responded to my post. I clicked on each of the four links, but got only a page saying Safari could not connect to the site.

I completely understand as it is frustrating for us as well. We do not like that our members, buyers, vendors, etc are unhappy as contrary to belief, we care a lot about all of you as well as this site.

It is our home and you all are our family.

When we log in as a member, we are seeing their account exactly as they see it, I promise. We are no longer logged in as an Admin/Staff member.

I wonder if it's Safari...can you please try using Chrome and see if it works on that? if it does, that is a whole new issue I will be taking to the programmers so it is very important. I was using Chrome earlier when I was logged in as you.

Please keep me posted.

You can also email me at store@renderosity.com as well

Kristi, I don't have Chrome nor have I ever used it. I have Safari and Firefox. Again, your links in the email you sent did not work this time either.

I will let the programmers know there are issues using these browsers as I appreciate you getting back to me.

You will have to copy and paste the link into your email as it is not a direct link because for whatever reason it was not working.

Thank you,

So, given that I also use a Mac and Safari (as I imagine several others here do as well), I went to my PC and used my even-older version of Safari and it worked well enough to download "webarchive" pages, which I use to "bookmark" items I am interested in without having to go into a store's website all the time. That's a quick way for me to make decisions. But as Nitab and midoyle have pointed out, Renderosity's code seems to be deficient. If I can download webarchive pages on a PC with an older version of Safari, then the problem is with the Mac coding for this re-design and not Safari. The page never concludes, just spins and spins. What this means is that there is no way to save the page. That is a big drawback for me (Item No. 1 above - spins without end). If Renderosity would prefer that Mac users go somewhere else, then so be it. But it is my feeling that your site should be compatible with all browsers, and particularly as many older browsers as possible. I mean, surely Renderosity does not believe that the consumer market should be forced to buy the latest and greatest operating systems just to purchase the wireframe for a building or a corset? You folks talk a lot about the community here, but we here in the community are trying to tell you that this re-design is the PITS and we don't want it. Once again, it is counter-intuitive, hard to navigate, functionality is hidden or hard to get to (or even just plain gone away), and slow! Please, folks, revert back to the previous design before you lose loyal customers. Of course, it's your website. You can do with it what you will.

I will report the issue with using a Mac computer and Safari to our team. We will indeed look into this issue as we want everyone to be able to navigate and browse the site. Can you tell me what version of the Mac OS you are using and what version of the Safari browser you are currently using please?

Changing things just for the sake of changing things is never a good idea--especially when you have a legion of customers already used to an existing interface.

Fixing an existing problem is certainly okay.

But if it ain't broke,...

Please let us all know when it's worth trying to use the website on any browser. Tried safari, chrome and IE.. It's all too in my face and I can't cope with all the push push push of stuff I don't want to buy when I'm looking for something else.... I had to look on DAZ Instead... That seems to be the current workaround for me unfortunately.

jennblake,
As for me, I use a MacPro with Snow Leopard (10.6) and Safari 5.0.3 (which is the last version to work with Snow Leopard). Any further upgrade to either OS or Safari would require me to upgade rather expensive music applications, which I am not willing to do. If your re-design now forces the user to upgrade to later versions of either, then I would say it was a bad decision to re-design an already completely functional business site. So, if the answer is going to be I need to upgrade Safari, which would require a upgrade to my OS, then my response would be to reduce my wishlist here and probably do much less shopping here. Which is a shame really, because some of the best vendors reside here - Applejack, Rhiannon, Dreamland, 3D-Age, powerage, kaleya, outoftouch, and Sabby, Silver, nikisatez, nirvy, and a host of others. You know, just because someone cuts a new road through the forest doesn't necessarily mean it will lead to a better place. The road we had was well-paved and well-traveled for a reason.

Ah, as for the great vendors here, I should also have included sandra-bonello, lilflame, sveva, hameleon, Darkworld, coflek-gnorg, hongyu, 3-DArena, Shana ShanasSoulmate, SWAM, Al3d, Mairy, 3Dream, Belladzines, P3D-Art, Atenais, lululee, CJ-studio, renapd, halcyone, boundless, ironman13, Pretty3D, BadKittehCo, Arrin, Nationale7, DreamlandModels (and not just Dreamland), vyktohria, Val3DArt, kobamax, Richabri, Godin, Freja, Adiene, Maddelirium, and of course Biscuits, fabiana, addy and Anagord! And the list goes on!

First, I commend Renderosity for adding a vendors selection at the bottom of the Marketplace dropdown button on the home page, and then re-installing a dropdown vendor list on the subsequent vendor page. Thank goodness for that (although you still have to go the vendor page to find it). Your coders might think about using a subfolder/submenu on the main page where the Marketplace dropdown is, and then at the bottom where the selection for the vendor page is found they could code a hover button or selection button for a submenu popup to the right or left of the vendor list, thus allowing the user to select the vendor immediately (or use it to find out the spelling - people don't always use things the way one assumes). There is Java code for this, and it should be easy for them to find it and adapt it for their use. It's called a JMenu and would be added as a child to the current JMenu or JPopupMenu. If they want to consider using that paradigm and can't find the code, let me know and I would be happy to e-mail a generic version of it to them. It would basically be a version of the CascadeMenu.java code, with which they are probably familiar (if they are using Java - otherwise I'm sure whatever language they are using would have similar code). Just a suggestion.

Yesterday, I posted a new thread on the Community forum ("Say Goodnight, Gracie"). Apparently it was removed after a short while because management didn't like what it said about management decisions. It was harsh and it was critical, but it was not obscene in any way. And other than saying management (or management styles) were hardheaded and intransigent, it was not derogatory. Critical, but not derogatory. But, hey, it's Renderosity's web site. I have now reduced my 27 pages of items in my Wishlist ($12,500) to a single page ($500). Because, hey, it's my money. I will make a couple of more purchases and then delete the rest of the Wishlist (that first purchase was last night; one to go). After that, my time here will be brief. Wow, 12 years as a loyal customer made no difference at all. Wow.