NEW: find tartans by colour!

[Nick Fiddes]

We've just put online the next stage in the evolution of our tartan finder:
http://www.scotweb.co.uk/materialfinder.html

Any comments, complaints, other forms of criticism etc. from this expert bunch of enthusiasts would be much appreciated!

We believe it's the only facility in the world that lets you search for tartans including particular colours and then see woven fabrics in your choices - using the official Scottish Tartans Authority tartan definitions! PLEASE NOTE: only about 1/3 of our tartans are 'unified' in this way at the moment, so for most you'll only see our woven-to-order options meanwhile. But the rest should be fixed in the next few weeks.

Also, the interface is a tad more funky in Firefox, due to Internet Explorer limitations. But it should be fully functional in any browser, and if not we'd really like to hear about it...

Thank all!

Nick

[Coinneach]

Very nice.

I had a little trouble at first after bringing up a selection of tartans. The More link at the bottom of the list was where I expected the Next link to be. I was in the 30s before I knew it. That being said, the Next link at the top is a nice convenience, so I can learn where the Next link is at the bottom.

What I really like is being able to further narrow the colour search by the alphabet listing.

What I don't understand is how the search results are listed...it doesn't appear to be alphabetical.

[Nick Fiddes]

Thanks Coinneach,

In fact the results are sorted by 'relevance' - i.e. by proportion of the first selected colour primarily, then by second colour but with less importance, and so on.

We felt this was the best way to return results to people searching by colour, rather than alphabetical as when searching by name. We *could* offer an option to re-sort by alphabet. Does anyone feel this would be important? Or perhaps just a line at the top explaining 'Sorted by relevance' to help with clarity?

[Rex_Tremende]

I tried this search the other day and found it easy to use. What I liked best about the experience is that it brought up tartans that I had not seen (at least in the same way) before. Paging through tartans alphabetically is helpful if you are looking for a specific name, but by the time you get to "T" they all start looking alot alike. So I appreciate the relevance order.

The one feature I would have liked, after selecting for color, was to further filter by one of the other classes you've already divided the tartans into. I'd like to exclude restricted tartans, for instance, and I might be particularly interested in district tartans, in stock, or available weights. Maybe this was there. If so, I missed it.

Thanks for giving us the test drive.
Rex.

[MacTavishOfJapan]

I like the idea of this, well done. I know have two red tartan kilts so it's handy to be able to search for different base colours!

Edit to add that it might be useful to be able to exclude tartans by colour to!

[Ozman1944]

Thanks Nick; very easy to use; I didn't even know there was TWO Welsh "Harris" Tartans. The blue toned one is really nice. The 'Usual' one reminded me of a 'Poor man's Stewart'

[James MacMillan]

That feature is very nice - - Thanks!!

[Baysideboy]

Great feature! Lots of fun to use. I had no idea there was an Adams tartan...here comes kilt no. 3!

[Nick Fiddes]

You asked... we listened! Our wonderful techs have just spent another hefty chunk of grey matter on enabling our tartan finder's colour search to omit colours, and/or to limit to colours listed, as requested. Hey, just think of us as being your own personal programming service! ;-)

http://www.scotweb.co.uk/tartan

[pdcorlis]

That is so flippin' cool! Well done Nick and well done techs!