apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I would like to see the slideshows improved, as generally I don't like the format. I would also like to see FOUR stars for AT. Does anyone remember a time pre-AT? Goodness, it's about as good as it gets.

I agree with the slideshow comment....loved how the fall colors slideshow worked. I do adore you AT :)!!

Hear hear! about the slideshow. Not only are they a pain to navigate, there doesn't seem to be any consistency when it comes to captions. I too liked the format of the Fall Colors slideshow.

Keep up the good work, AT! I love to squander my time with you!

yay - national attention on slideshow-gate :) now they'll get fixed ;)

the simplest fix would be to have them launch in a new browser window. Done.

I second the new browser window/tab for slide shows - so that when you are done, you can go back to the location you were reading last at on the main page. All you need is a little
target="_blank" coding after your links.

The tone could probably be raised by getting rid of the commenters. A lot of the time we're a bunch of bitchy, neurotic clowns ;)

I totally agree with the review by Robinson.

Huh. Based on reading the review, I'm amazed the score was so high. She sounded bored and slightly bee-ahtchy about the whole thing.

And to criticize a successful blog for advertising these days is absurd. It's like, oh, I don't know, criticizing a magazine or newspaper for having ads.

And Blandwagon, who you callin' neurotic?? ;)

2.5/3 isn't bad at all. i would give it the same rating myself. not because of the ads, which i agree are to be expected (what popular blog doesn't have ads?), but because there are so many bizarre spelling errors, frequent repeat posts, and occasional lapses in judgment and/or sensitivity on the part of the bloggers. as an editor, it's things like this which make me gnash my teeth in frustration, because all it would really take is one competent person to minimize these mistakes, yet they go by unfixed. (yes, i realize i must come across as one of the "neurotic clowns" mentioned by blandwagon.)

the 2.5, on the other hand, is just for the sheer amount of awesome content. so far, i haven't seen another home design blog which comes close. keep up the good work!

lemonpie--

You'd have much more credibility if you hadn't typed that all in lower case.

Whenever I view a slideshow, I always open it in a new tab, and I think it works fine.

2.5 sounds pretty good to me. There's always room for improvement.

If you read AT through Google Reader or use Adblock Plus on the Firefox Internet Browser, you see almost no ads anywhere ever.

These are the two reasons why I was surprised to find out that ApartmentTherapy had ads at all!

...additionally, you can fix your "new window" slideshow woes by hitting the 'Ctrl' key when you click the slideshow link. Will that give you a new tab, no?

To be fair, there's fairly little of regional interest on this or the other cities. On the comparative, I feel like I get more "regional" aspects from Chicago, New York, Boston and DC, with regard to local urban events and stores and neighborhoods (and Boston tends to cover all of New England with just a couple bloggers of its own). In the San Francisco AT, it almost doesn't matter where your bloggers came from, but it's SF-centric except when you get a house tour or contest entry, and even there, I don't get "you have to live in Oregon to get this". The Montreal, KC, and Austin outposts are far more prominent than anything about north of San Francisco.

Much of AT is ok, but I don't like the ads that slide out from the side and cover the article, I don't like the ones that freeze up the page load, and I don't like the ones that talk. There was an annoying 9West ad a week or so ago. I don't like the PR announcement of 11/3 that it was AT policy to block all political ads. I have tried AdBlock, I messed something and it wasn't working with consistency and jammed it up, so I unimplemented it for now. Would like to try again successfully.

The repeated posts almost always to look and look again at something silly. The cycle of encouraging people to live with less, to part with their dear things, and then save or salvage trash to make into some larger piece of trash, or just compulsively collect and display in quirky containers. I do like to see "different" things, but a lot is "the same" and when it's different, it's way out there. Variety in the middle ground would be fantastic.

Sorry I'm such a cranky tool all the time, but I give you lots of hits! I agree AT is a great way to waste a lot of time. So someone in Oregon gave you 2.5 stars out of 3, but I think you can achieve 5 stars on that scale if you really tried.

happiness, thanks for your tip!

New windows for slideshows (target="_blank"!) would go along way.

Also, the repeat posts (sometimes even on the same day!) are lame, especially in the age of Google docs and Twitter. Talk- or email- amongst yourselves!

That said, I love Apartment Therapy and the Danish Modern fetish it has given me.

I love apartmenttherapy; doing the 8-Week Cure this fall has sent me into absolute addiction.

But -- just since we're on the topic of criticisms and improvement -- can I PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, gently, in the nicest possible way, **BEG** y'all to school your writers on the difference between "it's" and "its"?? Using "it's" as a possessive is such a consistent, daily mistake I would pause, amazed, if I ever saw "its" used correctly on this site. As a reader, it drives me crazy :(

Apartment Therapy:
IT'S awesome!
ITS content rocks!

I adore this blog and read it religiously. My ONLY complaint is the registration process user interface. When my friends wanted to vote for my house in the Fall Colors contest and attempted to register, it was a mess. Many of them left after being unable to figure it out.

To help them, I sent them the following instructions.
1. In order to vote, you'll need to create an account.
2. Go to the main AT page and scroll all the way to the bottom to create an account. You'll have to wait for all entries to load.
3. Enter your username and password.
4. Then go to your personal email to confirm the account.
5. Then go back to the site and navigate back to Fall Colors > Northwest > my entry.

I should not have had to explain it. Are there any user interface improvements you can make to enable a simpler registration process?

If they clicked on the 'LogIn/Register' on the contest voting page, they were redirected back to the homepage where it wasn't obvious that registration box was at the very bottom of a long page. It worked like a misdirected link. Perhaps that contest page link could have had an HMTL anchor to force load the registration within the browser window? Or can there be a register button on the homepage? Is there one that I can't find?

Thanks for listening, um, reading. - spacesha

I've got to second the thanks to 'happiness' for the AdBlock Plus add on. Makes a huge difference!

^_^