New Homepage Look

Last week we updated the homepage. We wanted to add a little more excitement to it:

1. Introduction Update - we thought it was a little too static, so we added some more color to it and a countdown to our beta 0.3. One of the cool things about us is that we'll constantly be releasing improvements to iloho so we wanted to show that off.
   
2. Contest Flash - The contest didn't stand out enough so we changed some of the typography in the contest flash, no biggy, but we hope people can now see it.
3. Contest Standings - We'll update these every week. We wanted people to know if they're going to win or not, so hopefully, this will attract visitors who want to win. Check it out every week to see the standings!
4. Top Posts - we changed this whole concept, we used to have the top groups and top itineraries on the right so people could see what's going on with the rest of the site, but we felt that this might be unnecessary, because people usually navigate to where they want to go. Here we changed the top posts to top all-time posts and we gave the articles a score instead of a static one to five count.

Here's the old homepage:

What we've been up to at iloho

It seems that we've been neglecting the blog here. We've been quite busy with getting iloho launched and we'd love for anyone that stumbles upon this blog to visit our site (www.iloho.com). Of course, we always want to hear feedback from people, good or bad (info@iloho.com).

That being said, we've spent some time before the launch designing a cool travel contest that runs till the end of August. Check out what you can win at http://www.iloho.com/static/contest.

After we launched on the 18th, the team has been busy with bug fixes, plus minor usability and cosmetic changes.

Three things happened right near launch day that were huge issues.

1. No one had a clue how to use the site so we had to add in a whole header explaining the site. Something we had planned for, but got lost in the commotion of launch.
2. We had a big issue with hotmail users not getting our emails, the emails didn't even go into a spam folder. We had to turn off verification for hotmail users.
3. We redesigned the entire itinerary section. It was a several step process that could be saved as draft, and although the draft idea was and is a good one which we still hope to implement, the UI was far too clunky to use, so we dropped it for a single page submission.
   

Since then, we've just been correcting small bugs, plus adding little visual things, my favorite was our new "lickable" search box. This week we're starting to move beyond bug fixes and add new features, which we will be doing constantly so stay tuned!