Matthew,
Maybe I’m not the typical visitor of your website and probably most other visitors couldn’t care less …, but I don’t find your website very attractive (to put it very mildly) from a design point of view. When my wife saw me the other day in front of my PC screen, she was amazed that I could spend so much time on the C2 site. And she is absolutely right.
I think that the website needs a more modern, fresh, clean and sober design.
Of course the content of your site is more important than the look. But I would enjoy the C2 experience much more when you would pay a more attention to the overall look and feel of your website.
You are preaching to the choir!
But here’s the problem. Despite what a lot of users think, I barely turn any profit on C2. It costs an extraordinary amount of money to run the site, to hire programmers to help me, and - most of all - to buy the advertising that brings users to the site (which is vital for all the system developers here, who expect me to bring new subscribers to them!)
So I just haven’t had the free cash to devote to hiring a design firm to do a major overhaul of the site, which I agree is very much needed.
If anyone knows of a good web designer (or firm) who is experienced in re-designing existing sites, who has some modicum of understanding of mod-perl and AJAX technologies, and who can work relatively inexpensively, then please email me privately: matthew at collective2.com. Thanks! (And I do appreciate this feedback!)
Matthew,
The upgrades you made over the past few days really look great!! Thank you for all your support and hard work. C2 is a great service and I just want you to know how much I personally appreciate all your efforts.
Sincerely,
Ray
I think C2 is a great site and I’m very happy with it both as a subscriber and as a vendor. However, if we’re talking about improvements I would much rather like to see enhanced functionality instead of fancy graphics. Maybe this is actually the right time to send in my wish list:
1. downloadable data (daily equity as shown in equity curve and trade-by-trade statistics)
2. the ability to auto trade a system through multiple brokers without using multiple e-mail addresses (and paying multiple fees)
3. a subscriber defined stop-loss functionality (see my other thread)
4. less server downtime
5. shorter polling intervals for autotrading
6. more detailed information on the real-life fills
I like it as-is. It is simple, uncluttered, and easy to navigate thru. Often when a website is "upgraded" just for appearance sake, ease of use is lost. Also, sites that try to be real pretty often use text/background with inadequate contrast. This makes it nearly impossible to read on some laptop screens, as well as by those of us with mediocre eyesight. (One site that I used to visit would use light blue on white for text that was emphasized. I quit going to that site just for that reason.)
Hans.
Good that you say this. I was a little afraid to write a similar post because it is almost politically incorrect to be against fancy websites, but I agree totally with you.
In addition to the wish list of Science Trader, I would like to have more statistics on the overview page of all systems, like Max draw down, # of contracts traded, and return corrected for commissions and autotrade slippage.
Let me add one item I forgot to my wish list:
7. A statistic that shows what % of subscribers to a system are still subscribed after a certain period of time (e.g. 1 month, 3 months). This should give a good indication if the system works for people in real-life.
Add me to the list. I do not really care any fancy looks either. Don’t want the page access time increase because of adding graphics. The simple content and background are easier to work with. Spending efforts on functions is much practical for daily usage.
If anything on the look to change, I would say shorten the system page. There are too many scrolling up and down than necessary. The page lenth could be easily shorten by reducing the line spacing. Most other sites have less spacing than C2.
The system review can also be very lenthy (like extreme-os) and create a lot blank area. It would be nice to limit it to 2 most current reviews and show “# more” in the link to review page.
After all, too many information in one page also increase the page loading time every access. Why not just keep each section brief head-lined and provide details in a pop-up window (URL linked). No need to waste the bandwidth every time on sections users are interest only once in a while.
"Despite what a lot of users think, I barely turn any profit on C2."
In that case: Can I be of assistance? I would like to write a subroutine that, given an array with daily equities of a system, computes a number of statistics, like average draw down, Sortino ratio, annualized return / max draw down, etc. I imagine that a file with results can be sent automatically as a text file attachment of the "send e-mail" functionality, so that changes to this subroutine can easily be made by me without you changing the C2 layout all the time.
Great. Let’s take this discussion off-line. I’m always anxious to have users contribute functionality to C2!
I’ll contact you via email. Thanks. - MK
Hello Mathew,
with my Opera browser (v9.02 under Windows2000 Pro), the new "Add to my Analyst Page" button does not work.
Maybe you can do anything about it.
Thanks.
Matthew,
Would it be possible to implement a “data dump” function in a similar way as the autotrading interface works? In this way it shouldn’t require you a lot of programming and no changes would be necessary to the C2 website. At the same time it would give those who are interested in the raw trade-by-trade data and historical equity, a quick way to obtain these data, rather than having to cut and paste it from the site. E.g. for me, and perhaps others, it would be very helpful if I could poll the C2 server once a day indicating the trading system(s) of interest and receive back an XML file with the raw historical data that I could subsequently use for my own analyses.
Hey Matt, I think the sight is pretty cool. The customer service is excellent. If you could get more Pink Pigs with 11 systems offered, and take 30% of my " revenue report", you oughtta be doing just fine…Jon
