Categories, shopping. Don't forget to unit test.

So, it's been a little hiatus; hard at work;

Some of my australian readers may know of the Trading Post, a classifieds site which the biggest local telco bought for $636 million a few years ago. Trading Post was the go-to classifieds site & newspaper all around the country, and the new owners had a chance to turn it even bigger; Maybe even work against eBay in the local market.

So, as we now know, this didn't happen. Oopsie. Trading Post had revenue falling by 7% last year, and readership down by an even higher percentage. They've tried all sort of tricks, but to no avail.

One of the tricks, here, is that when all these strategies are bandied about, the core product and the little things are forgotten about. Such as unit testing. And speed. And Making sure things are good for the user. Check out, in the image,

1. How ugly the format of the category is
2. the null category with 26 items in it. I wonder what those 26 nulls are.
3. The meaningless deals to buy toilets and vanities on the side. Showing users things they don't need or want, even though, for instance, it's quite easy to find from my IP that i'm not in Victoria nor Queensland.

Thats my theory. The fact is, the people on the ground at Trading Post aren't paying attention to the details, and really should.

[note: I did at one point work for the parent company of Trading Post, Telstra, but have no affiliation of link to the company today.]