DriverGuide Blog

We just completed the upgrade to PHP 5.  With a site as big and complex as ours, upgrading from PHP 4 was no simple matter!  We had to test, and test, and test, and fix lots of little issues that we expected, and some we didn’t.  But, it’s now done and we are live!  Hope PHP 6 won’t be coming soon!

You may notice in the header of each page we now have little flags indicating a few of the most common languages of our members.  Click one and see the site in that language!  Google has taken an interesting approach, combining automated language translation with user-submitted improvements.  Vive la difference!

We’ve completely revamped our search engine!  Not only do we have a whole new backend which is far superior, providing much better matches, with much more relevancy, but also we’ve got an amazing new faceted interface and result display that lets you find the files you need with much more control and less confusion!

The new faceted lets you drill down to the results you want by showing you the filters available to you which match items in the search results!  So if you search for “photosmart 7550″ we’ll find all the companies, device types, and operating systems that match those keywords and show you how many results are found for each.  And in this case you’ll quickly see that “Hewlett-Packard”, “printer”, and “XP”  is what you want for filters, and a few clicks will show you just the results you wanted. Try it today!

Windows 7 is coming, and DriverGuide is ready for it!  If you’ve got access to the Windows 7 beta and there are drivers you’re looking for, search here!  We’ve got quite a few.

After months of work we’ve completely reworked our download pages and it’s now life!  We listened to your feedback and have cut the clutter!  The new pages are far easier to use, much cleaner, and the proof is in the downloads!  Take a look!

We upgraded quite a bit of code on our backend to make scan and toolkit searches faster!  It’s a lot of work searching so many devices and so many drivers, but we’ve found a few ways to speed things up.  See if you notice the improvements.

We were doing some work on the backend this week, to fix some performance issues and improve results and we had to purge some caches, so search performance will be slower than usual for the next few days.  Sorry, but it’s for a good cause.

We made some improvements to the scan and toolkit search results page. 

• Simplified the page preamble to move the results higher on the page.
• Added a tabbed interface to make the pages shorter, and give you quicker access to the updates you’re likely looking for.
• Cleaned up the page a bit, simplified quite a few areas.

After months of work we’ve just released our first “Version 3″ update. Much more to come, but this is the foundation on top of which the other stuff will come.

Our mission in this major update was to reduce the clutter and complexity of the site, try to improve the usability of the existing features, and then add new and exciting features.

On Monday we went live with the new first release, primary changes at this point include:

• Update the header/footer to be cleaner, more useful.
• Eliminate the cluttered left and right navigation columns from all pages. Rely instead on context relevant features and a “sub tab” where those features can be accessed.
• Redesign our old “search wizard” to deliver an easier experience more akin to a guided browse, including breadcrumb navigation links to go back.
• Redesign our driver lists to make them easier to use, including a breadcrumb navigation links to go back.
• Recreate the new home page to focus on the primary things users want to do when they come to our site: 1) keyword search for their driver! 2) scan their system for driver updates! 3) browse for updates based on manufacturer/device type.
• Replace our old search engine with a new one! We now use a new backend search engine which is much better. An exciting new search UI will come in the next few weeks!
• and more…

So, welcome to v3, hope you like it, and if you don’t, tell us (but don’t be a jerk about it, give us specific feedback, good or bad)!

Quinxy