GUI overhaul, jquery goodness

We mentioned it a month and a half ago, we were going to overhaul the layout of places.ae.

Well, this is it.

No, it didn’t change much in terms of “visuals”.. the grey background became white, and we also ditched the round corners. since they are so 2008

Few more things that happened from a visual point, but some that you might not notice immediately are:

• We have a thickbox / lightbox / colorbox, however you wanna call it (try adding a phone number when logged in, and you’ll see what we mean)
• Phone numbers are now: +971 X YYY ZZZZ, instead of +971XYYYZZZ. (The spaces make it more readable)
• Fatter and better working auto complete on the home screen
• Tags are now displayed per popularity, so there’s a bit of consistency there
• Burj Dubai is on the front page now

Behind the scenes, following things were done:

• JQuery: the entire site is now in JQuery, yay.
• JQuery is served from google’s API hosts, so chances are big that you have it in your cache. (Saves you a whopping 55kB)
• We serve images of a different host now, to increase the performance
• We server CSS from another host also. (which got reduced to only one single file now, and it gets cached for ages)
• We serve now RSS for search results, you can see an example here.

So, we’re still finetuning the new layout, to come up with more AJAX goodness, increasing performance and ironing out some bugs. If you come across any bug, or would like to have something different, please let us know on webmaster@places.ae.

Thank you,
Michael