New VPS Website and it’s all Web 2.0!!

By on May 13, 2008 in Blacknight, Hosting, irishblogs, News, vps

Well it isn’t quite Web 2.0. But it’s now new and improved and shiny.
And before I get any complaints, we know Safari doesn’t look perfect yet :-) .
We’ve removed .net and Linux VPS plans, you now have a simplified version of the site that has VPS plans that are OS agnostic. When you click buy now you’ll be able to use our fancy vps-shop web application to choose your OS and the package you want and whether or not you want to add Plesk!
So where is this fancy application I hear you cry. Any buy now link on Blacknightvps.com will now take you to it.
All pricing for each period and for plesk etc is all contained within the web app.
There’s a few small issues outstanding that we’ll be fixing in time.
1) Safari doesn’t work well right now (if at all :/)
2) The initial page load is a little slow, we’re aware of this, it’s because of the volume of information being retrieved from our backend that causes this, we’re working on it.
3) Changing OS doesn’t appear to keep your selected options in all browsers. However if you change plan from basic to standard it keeps all your choices!
4) Non javascript users we’ll have a more accessible version soon (within a week or two) that’ll work particularly well for the visually impaired.
Please let us know what you think of the new simplified version of the site.
All feedback and comments are welcome.

About Paul Kelly

I'm the CTO and Co-Founder of Blacknight. I've got a deep rooted interest in hosting and technology, especially what's on the cutting edge. From day to day I dream up new products, ways to reinvent products and services.
View all posts by Paul Kelly →

, , , , , , ,

4 Responses to New VPS Website and it’s all Web 2.0!!

  1. Darragh May 13, 2008 at 11:06 #

    Accessible to the Visuallly impaired? The site as it stands is absolutely fine. Granted, the tab order of the elemts isn’t exactly logical in places but that’s something that can be fixed with a bit of time. I certainly wouldn’t say that you need to provide a non-javascript version of the page for that reason.
    Thanks for thinking of it though but screen reading technology is more than able to use that site.
    Tested with Jaws, Window Eyes and Hal in Windows and Orca in Linux.

  2. Paul Kelly May 13, 2008 at 11:20 #

    Hi Darragh,
    Good to know it works well with screen readers. I was a bit anxious about that. Thanks for the feedback. We’ve been trying to get accessibility right for a while.

  3. Keith Gaughan May 13, 2008 at 17:12 #

    @Darragh: It can still do with some work and not just for the visually impaired.
    For instance, it needs proper labels radio and checkboxes. Currently there’s some JavaScript juju the programmer put in to simulate them in some places. Neither needed as the label element would be better, nor done everywhere it that ought to have it.
    Also, if you’re partially sighted, the unselected tabs along the top are difficult to read because the lack sufficient contrast between the background and foreground colours.
    There’s a bunch of other niggly problems with it, most of which are implementation issues and don’t really affect users greatly.
    It’s not so much that we’re looking to have a separate non-javascript version, it’s more that the VPS shop has an overreliance on JS, and we need to trim that down somewhat. The slow load time is related to this, but also has to do with caching of data on the server, which is, er, nonexistent.

  4. Keith Gaughan May 13, 2008 at 17:24 #

    The accessibility problems are more down to making it easier for the partially sighted and people with motor control problems. To give a simple example, the unhighlighted tabs are difficult to read, even for somebody with 20:20 vision because of the lack of contrast.
    Also, there’s many places where JS is being used for things the browser’s already able to do. An example would be the way JS is being used to provide clickable radio button labels. This should have been done with the label element instead. There’s lots of other places where there’s similar problem we need to fix, all of which help make the store more sluggish than it ought to be.
    It’s not so much that we’re going to be providing a non-JS version as the JS in the current site you see is going to be just icing rather than the whole cake.