New Skyrove Portal

The current Skyrove Hotspot Portal doesn’t look too great. The main reason for this is that it was designed ‘by programmers, for programmers’. This means it was built to be functional, rather than aesthetic.

We place a lot of value on simplicity, but sometimes a simple nature does not imply it will be simple to use or understand. Imagine a computer keyboard with only one button. You could use Morse code to enter data! Very simple, but not really user-friendly.

We’ve started redesigning our Portal page (the first page anyone sees when they connect to a Skyrove Hotspot).

Our requirements are:

1. Must be user-friendly

2. Must be fast to load

3. Must give all pertinent information, but not too much information

4. Skyrove Hotspot Provider must be able to provide their own logos, pictures and some advertising, within limits.

5. Regardless of point 4, there must be a consistent look & feel across all Skyrove hotspots, making it instantly recognizable by Skyrovers.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

Changes to the way we charge for megabytes

When Skyrove started charging for megabytes, instead of for minutes, a lot of people said we were simply overestimating the intellectual capacity of our customers. “No-one understands a megabyte”. Be that as it may, it seems most people have figured out that Skyrove’s prepaid per megabyte billing system is both more convenient and cheaper overall! There are many other reasons for 24/7 access based on per megabyte billing, and I’ll be sure to post about them in another post.
Up till now Skyrove has been charging only for downloaded megabytes. This means that some customers could be running photo servers and the like without Skyrove Providers getting paid for it.

In places where Skyrove Providers pay for bandwidth going up and down, this could lead to significant losses.

By the end of the month Skyrove will be amending the structure so that customers will be paying for both downloads AND uploads.

This will benefit both Providers and Skyrovers. Providers won’t be taking any risk of end users abusing bandwidth, and are therefore expected to drop their prices.