The team at Noonsite.com are pleased to unveil the latest updates to our website, the ultimate cruiser’s planning tool. In the first major change to the current edition of Noonsite, we have rolled out a host of updates and design improvements to enhance the site user experience, based on feedback from our worldwide user community.

Published 2 years ago

Why make these changes?

Since our last major update in 2019, we have become a victim of our own success as visitor numbers and memberships have increased month on month. Over the winter period our development team has worked hard to improve site speed and page load times, which have been slower than we wanted.

Noonsite is a big website, with more than 60,000 pages of content and nearly 30,000 registered members. In the past, our pages were huge, with a lot of data on each page. We would often load 100, 200, 300 or more pieces of data to load one page, causing slowdowns and timeouts with the database and the web server. There were also problems identified with parts of the JavaScript that powers some of our advanced features, which would fail to load on time, causing a poor user experience.

In this latest release, we have reduced the content on each page, reducing both the database and web server load. In cases where we need to load more content, we have moved to an on-demand process. For example, when viewing ports, related businesses load on demand now. Behind the pages we have optimized our database queries and storage and used server-side query caching where possible and rebuilt all our advanced features for a smoother visitor experience.

And there is more….

We have also used this rebuild to add many “quality-of-life” changes to make the site easier to use and navigate.

The key changes include:

• Simplified site navigation, which uses icons to improve layout.

• Easy access to comments on all pages with the simple bubble icon.

• We took a strict mobile-first approach, as 60-80% of the time members spend on Noonsite is on a mobile device.

• Our map feature has been rebuilt to be faster and easier to use and to facilitate full-screen usage, plus we incorporated clusters on the map to improve render times.

• The popular Noonsite Offline Access/ Port Download feature has been redesigned to be easier to use and understand with a dedicated icon on port and country pages, plus we have also split the offline access for each port into several smaller downloads.

• We have improved the formalities restriction limits, so viewing a formality you have already viewed that month no longer counts towards your fair-use limit.

• We have switched some content from auto-load to load-on-demand and enhanced the login screen.

And coming next…

We are busy planning and working on our next round of improvements which will focus on enhancing or extending existing member-only features, plus we want to add new member-only features.

Our members love to share their feedback, which we use to improve the site and user interfaces based on their real-world usage, and of course, our editorial team continues updating our site content daily.

If you have a feature that you would like to see added to Noonsite, let us know by contacting editor@noonsite.com.