A downside of adding pieces one by one to the TrueDelta site is that, as these accumulate, the whole can become disorganized. More than a few people have found the resulting site organization confusing and even frustrating.

I’ve been working on the site organization. Among the changes: clicking on “Reliability” on the homepage now goes to the latest survey results rather than to the page about joining the panel. To compensate, other changes were made to make it clearer where to go to join, and why.

These changes are minor compared to another. For various reasons, when the Vehicle Repair History and Fuel Economy Surveys were launched they used a second, entirely separate vehicle list from the main reliability survey. In hindsight, this was a bad decision. Aside from the extra work of enrolling each vehicle twice, too often members thought they’d enrolled a new vehicle in the main survey when they’d only added it to the list for the other surveys.

So for the past few weeks I’ve been working on merging the two lists. Nearly every major script used to operate the site was affected, and much new code was required.

But as of late last night this project is complete. There is now a single vehicle list. It is now only necessary to enroll each vehicle once to participate in all the surveys. And hopefully it will be clearer when the Vehicle Reliability Survey should be used to report repairs (whenever possible) and when the Vehicle Repair History Survey should be (only when a repair cannot be reported on the main survey). Probably still some work to do there…

One result of this integration: it is now possible to enter specific bodystyle, trim, and powertrain information for nearly all of the 2002 or newer vehicles in the panel, just like it has been possible with the second list. (It will be possible to do this for earlier model years in the future.)

Now on to the next project.