The new Kelkoo

It has been a very long week (should I say a very long month? :) ). Indeed the launch of a revamped website that has the audience of Kelkoo is not an easy task. You have to take into account a multi-countries deployment on several data centers, you have to follow all the technical (CPUs, network…) and business (SEM, SEO, audience…) metrics, you have to prepare PR, you have to answer tons of questions to everybody, and of course you have to take care of remaining bugs ;) But all in one, it’s really a great experience, and the new Kelkoo is huge a leap forward compared to the old site. In short, the main benefits of this redesign are:

• A brand new look and feel based on a more rationalized and simplified design.
• A new optimized navigation to ease the browsing and help users find the right answer.
• A clearer and friendly home page for better guidance to users across the site.
• An improved Search section: new technology for better results, new filtering possibilities.
• Personalization features: “my history” module to bookmark products, see recent searches…
• Significant content enhancement: new shopping guides, new chart pages among several changes.

This release comes also with a lot of interesting technical changes (being part of Yahoo! is indeed a great benefit in term of front-end engineering):

• Support of A-grade browsers as defined by Yahoo!
• Intensive use of YUI library
• Cleaner HTML code more respectful for all the CSS / HTML standards (not fully compliant mainly for cross-browser compliance reasons).
• Usage of hListing microformat to represent listings.
• Nice Javascript fallback: the whole site remains usable even if Javascript is not enabled (but I would still recommend using Javascript for the full experience ;) ).

Reading the various blogs about this new release, I could summarize the main feedback as: “Kelkoo is catching up with the competition, but where is the innovation?“. This judgment is pretty fair, and I really think this release lays the foundation of future innovation. Indeed, expect more releases in the coming months.