discountvouchers.co.uk launches daily deals

[dougs]

Just some general info

We decided to have some fun and take on Groupon

We launched today in Birmingham and Newcastle:

http://deals.discountvouchers.co.uk/deal/birmingham

As can be seen for the numbers not a bad start

Doug

 

[brum]

Hey ... I'm shorting groupon .... Nice Doug good luck

 

[dougs]

Cheers

Been very interesting......especially as I have not been involved in any of it.

Doug

 

[brum]

Lol why does that not surprise me....

 

[philiporchard]

Nice one Doug!

We need offers and deals like this on each of our city domains...

Always too much to do!

 

[dougs]

link to us Phil

and we will pay you a commision

Doug

 

[dougs]

What an opening day?

We launched very very gently in 3 cities and been blown away by the numbers.

http://deals.discountvouchers.co.uk/deal/birmingham

Roll on next weeks deals

Some examples as we start to roll out more cities

http://deals.discountvouchers.co.uk...nchester-loves-fashion-thursday-1-december-15

http://deals.discountvouchers.co.uk/deal/nottingham/scuba-introduction-throw-deep-end-hour

Doug

 

[namestrands]

Every thought of expanding your reach with adding an affiliate program?

 

[Ashton]

Why use a subdomain?

Design is dull, right click -> blending options -> tick drop shadow = done.

A Birmingham deal which is actually a national deal from a company based in Surrey?

Nasty code output.

Sign up = choose city + enter postcode, why should I have to do both?

Too long fades on underlines and slideshow. Not to mention the deals page doesn't even have these fades (Which is better).

Stupid massive search icon compared to small search bar.

Testimonials from 3 people in their 20s... are they even your target audience? Is it really right to have 3 people from the same demographic, even 2 called Oli?

Also when I click 'see more cities' it says birmingham has 2, even when it has 3.

Title isn't clickable, I have to click 'read more'

Can't see a facebook like button at the top with google+ and tweet...

Username on sign up not checking instantly?

Honestly Doug, I have a lot of respect for you and I admire what you do, but this you can do better than this if you're attempting to compete with groupon / kgbdeals.

 

[The Ferryman]

Do you know the deals are displaying in dollars?
Regards
Bruce

 

[dougs]

Ashton

I think the numbers of sales speak that it works........honestly I think you are getting caught up in the details Look at Groupon/Livingsocial from a design viewpoint.

I will cover some simple points:

Subdomain - why not? but reason is simply internally we have different teams working on it and it was easier to do it that way

The rest of your points I will pass to people, but to be honest when the sales numbers are as high as they are on a soft launch I am going to congratulate them rather than criticise them for minor design issues. To launch something of this size and scale is a large amount of work and I was blown away at how good they had done to get it all live in 3 months.

Bruce - where are you located as they appear in pounds in the UK

Doug

 

[bensd]

Bruce - where are you located as they appear in pounds in the UK

Appearing as £ for me

 

[The Ferryman]

I am in Aberdeenshire, nearer Norway than much of the UK I suppose!
That was on my laptop, it is showing pounds now on my desktop.
I'll check my laptop settings, maybe they were set to US when I put Windows 7 on it.
Regards
Bruce

 

[Ashton]

Look at Groupon/Livingsocial from a design viewpoint

They were the first and living social has a decent design. You need pulls to differ you from them and design would have been an easy one to beat them on.

Subdomain - why not? but reason is simply internally we have different teams working on it and it was easier to do it that way

SEO reasons but ok. I would have thought it would have been fairly simple to do, I can restrict folders access to certain ftp logins and I would expect your teams to be using revision control and working on a local server.

The rest of your points I will pass to people, but to be honest when the sales numbers are as high as they are on a soft launch I am going to congratulate them rather than criticise them for minor design issues. To launch something of this size and scale is a large amount of work and I was blown away at how good they had done to get it all live in 3 months.

Of course congratulate them, they have done a good job, I am just pointing out areas of weakness which I would expect to be better.

Also this could have been done in 1 week with wordpress, but obviously you have your own CMS so that's ok.

As for minor design issues... you just replaced your entire sites design with a design nearly entirely comprised of 1 layer style in photoshop. Ie: Something anyone with a basic grasp of photoshop could do in 10 mins. If that impresses your customers and improves commission then it's fine, it just seems very bold to me!

You can overlook any criticism raised by pointing to the figures Doug. However neither of us know for sure if with a better design those figures would have been higher.

Look, this isn't exactly coming out how I would like it - I think you're a great guy and you have a great load of sites so don't take this as an attack on you or your team. It's just very frustrating for me to see both design and usability issues at this level. You might not see the value in good design, but I am sure your users and competitors do.

 

[The Ferryman]

That is strange, everything is all right now. Earlier, on my laptop, the left column was showing pounds and the right column had US dollars. Now they are both pounds.
Bruce

 

[Tricky1]

Subdomain - why not? but reason is simply internally we have different teams working on it and it was easier to do it that way

Why use a subdomain when you can purchase dailyoffer(s) co uk ;-)

 

[namestrands]

Awesome Site Dougs.. truly awesome

 

[dougs]

Cheers

No grief taken Ashton

Dv is 2 years old now and loads of the site is a mess, but simply we have been astounded by the growth. Imagine taking one idea and growing it to a "real" business with upto 200,000 visitors per day. You want to see the business and backend mess...tech is minor I'll give you a brief overview to show you what has happened

Started with one developer and one person and site bashed up in wordpress taking deals as we got emailed them, concept to see if it would work.

Now 3 offices, 3500 deals on anyone day, link builders, ppc team, press agency, daily deals team, content team, biz dev team, accounts department, tech team, data analysis team, useability tream, email team, management team, etc.......no business plan so to speak of.

On a daily basis I am not involved but I know every part of the business is yelling as they want things done by other parts of the business and the managers are juggling like mad

The major issue now is trying to get everyone to know what anyone else is doing as we move from a startup phase into being a main stay business. Having done this with carrentals.co.uk we know that this is the hard bit and it takes time, vision and some luck.

Doug
Ps Tricky1. The reason for not using a new site is that legally if we launch on that domain we can use the 6 million email subscribers. On a new domain we would not be able to do that.
Namestrands - cheers

 

[Ashton]

Ah I see your position now, pretty interesting!

That transitional part could really make or break you - you could easy take the #1 spot if done right, or you could stay where you are. (which isn't a terrible place to be at all, but not the best!)

Are you hiring consultants at all? Would be something worth seriously considering if not.

 

[dougs]

Consultants

We have loads of people who act as consultants to all of our business's We don't like fluffy people who write reports though, we like to people who deliver things. Some people make a great living from us, by just helping with us to develop one business and then we move them to help the next one.

Same with staff some of them move onto the next project. Some of the staff from cars are now the Directors/Shareholders of DV, similar in quite a few of the companies we now have in the Group. I just counted we now have 9 companies in the Group and in almost all cases the key staff/shareholders in those companies were either staff or consultants to us some where along the line.

Effectively we are becoming an incubator of ideas from people we know/trust/like. Very simple concept as we want them to do well as they have become friends. Obviously a side benefit is we expand the Group...

Doug