We are trying to free up a bunch of one employee's time so she can go through the design library and add keywords to all the designs. To make the time available to do this, we are looking at the time spent creating 7 separate download files vs the time spent making one as a way we can save a lot of her time.

Currently she spends about 30 hours of her work week making zip files, uploading them, and making html links to those files, etc. By changing to one zip file we can reassign about 20 hours per week of her time to the task of updating the design archives. At that rate we can see it being completed in a couple months instead of several years or never.

Making keyword searches work better has been on our "to-do" list for quite a while now. It always bugged Holly that she would do a search in our Library and not find a set of designs that she knew were there. The question from Jules in this post just happened to be in sync with our plans to update the library ASAP. I know that Jules also works in the computer-human interface field (for a "slighly" larger company than ours!) so maybe that's why she is on the same wavelength as us on the poor results from doing a search in our archives and we have to fix this. But, we need an employee to have time to do the fixes. :-)

When we switched in 2004 from the original way we made downloads to the current download system, it was to do three things...

1) eliminate having to click "I Agree" and other things before getting the file. (some of you remember that) 2) accommodate people on "dial-up" who had to wait longer for files to download size. 3) accommodate people with old 386 computers (32% of our customers then) who had a slow time unzipping large files.

None of these 3 problems really exist much today. We no longer have the "I agree" to get downloads. 94% of America are on broadband of some type. Hardly anyone still runs a 386 computer.

A big advantage of making downloads all in one zip is to eliminate a lot of the errors people receive when they try to download a zip. When we have to edit the html for 7 zip files it is 7 times more likely that we will make a mistake. That's why sometimes a member tries to download a file in one format and it doesn't work but another format does work. With only 1 zip file to link to it's a lot easier to get it right and not miss anything.

-- Larry

-- Larry

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