Gift List Blog - 2011

Latest Developments at GiftList.co.uk

Since the launch of GiftList.co.uk about two months ago, we've had loads of users setting up Gift Lists, adding Gifts, and some of those have been good enough to let us know how they're getting on, and what we could do to improve the site. This feedback has been collated and as a result, we've made a number of significant improvements to the site this week. We thought we'd let you guys know what's changed, so you can give it ... Read more

GiftList.co.uk Featured in Web User Magazine

Here at Gift List, we're very pleased to report that we've had a very positive review from the excellent Web User Magazine. They've described us as "one of the more sophisticated wish list sites out there", and rating us an excellent 4 out of 5 stars! We've even scanned in the article so you can have a read of it yourself. Web User is a great magazine for keeping up with the latest online tips and tricks (and of course fo... Read more

So... Who on Twitter wants this iPhone 4S the most?!

Seeing as we're getting close to ONE THOUSAND FOLLOWERS on Twitter now, we thought we'd have a shout out to see if anyone was actually listening... And it seems that rather a lot of you are! Earlier today, we asked our followers (just for a bit of fun) why they should win the iPhone 4S... We had lots of great responses - some that made us laugh out loud, some that tugged on our heart strings, and some people that are just des... Read more

Latest News from GiftList.co.uk

I'll start with an apology - sorry it's been so long since our last update, but I hope that once you've read the below you'll understand why... We've been rather busy here at Gift List! As you have probably already noticed, the win an iPhone 4S competition got underway today, and what an incredible response we've had from you all. Literally hundreds of entries within the first 6 hours, and we still have about 6 weeks to go! I... Read more

Latest Changes to GiftList.co.uk

My word. What a hectic week it's been here at GiftList Towers... If you've been keeping up with the blog, you'll have noticed that as soon as we got Ticketmaster and Waterstones stock on the site, we suddenly got John Lewis on-board as well! As flexible as our stock processing system is, it's taken a few reasonably sizeable changes to load the stock in, not least amending our Products so they can have a price range rather th... Read more

John Lewis join GiftList

We're very proud to announce that GiftList is now officially an affiliate of John Lewis. John Lewis is a one of the best-known brands in the UK, and they own a chain of department stores across the UK known for supplying upmarket products and their "never knowingly undersold" policy, which has been in use since 1925. Having the John Lewis stock on the site means you get an extra 85,000 high-quality products to search from, r... Read more

Ticketmaster and Waterstones join GiftList

We are pleased to confirm that Ticketmaster and Waterstones are now officially GiftList.co.uk Affiliates and you can now easily find all their products through the site and add them to your Gift Lists! Ticketmaster are the UK's largest online retailer of event tickets. Now that they're on-board, you can search through event tickets for almost 20,000 different events across the UK. Waterstones are the UK's best known bookstor... Read more

Three days in....

So, we're three days in now. And what a three days it's been. As word of the site starts to make it's way around the ether, we've been getting plenty of feedback and I'm pleased to say that the vast majority of it has been positive, and everyone has genuinely enjoyed using the site. There were one or two teething problems on Monday, but all of these issues were quickly identified and resolved without any site downtime. Not... Read more

GiftList.co.uk is Live!

It's been a challenging and eventful 6 months, but GiftList.co.uk is now Live. The site has just been through an extensive User-Acceptance Testing phase with a select group of site users, and has been very well received. Across all the testers, the site scored an average of over 8 / 10 for design, performance and functionality, and there were over 100 individual suggestions for improving the site. Many of these were duplic... Read more

Pre-Launch Phase Begins.

Ok, so it's been a couple of weeks since we last posted an update. What have we been up to in that time? It's essentially been the "sweep up" phase. As development rolls along on a site, new stuff crops up, existing planned things don't quite work how you thought they would, and developer-led testing brings out the occassional bug or three. These are referred to as "snags". We had some snags. 60 of them in total. Most of... Read more

GiftList.co.uk Nears Completion...

As the GiftList project nears the end of it's fifth month, the site is finally starting to come together. In that time, the following has taken place: * Full scoping and planning of the GiftList project, including a detailed business plan and a full project product description. * Signing up with 3 major affiliate networks and affiliating GiftList with almost 150 different online retailers. * Procurement and configuration... Read more

The third (and final) test post

So here it is, the third and final test post. The blogging system I've used is Subtext. It's a Microsoft-supported open-source project that describes itself as the solution to choose when you've decided all blogging software is to complicated and you're going to write your own. I'd say that's a fair assessment. I looked at DotNetNuke, but that was just silly. All the getting started stuff is about creating an entire website... Read more

The second test post

As the home page includes the latest three news items, I'm going to have to write three of these. This is the second one. New skills that I've managed to learn and use for this project are:   * PRINCE2 Project Management * jQuery (I could do a little bit, but I'm now confident with it) * ASP.NET MVC 3 (including the Razor engine) * C#.NET (Ok, I could already write in C#, but that was several iterations ago. I'm now flu... Read more

The first test post

This is the first test post for the GiftList.co.uk development site. So far today, I've managed to get all the delivered HTML implemented on the site, effectively meaning that the following pages are ready to go into the testing phase: * Register * Account Activation * Log In * Create Profile * Welcome Page * Create List * Activation Successful * Activation Failed Following that, I've scripted in the 25 development ... Read more