Whew, so we’ve been kinda quiet as of late because the team has been furiously busy redesigning the entire site. We spent a LOT of time and consideration combing through ever page of the site to figure out how we could make it better. We talked to many of our loyal users about what they would like to see. After months of planning and coding, we finally are ready to unveil the redesigned site to the world. Most of our regular users will find that the site hasn’t changed dramatically, but that the subtle changes and tweaks will be noticeable.
The first thing you’ll notice is our new modular layout. Lots of users gave us feedback that they really liked our original user interface, but we knew we could improve upon it by making content more accessible. We felt like it was easier to consume all of the content on a given spot if we separated out different features like the news headlines, forums, links, and now videos.
Our new video features is the next big thing you’ll see that’s changed. We noticed that videos have become one of our most popular offerings on the site. So we focused on how we could improve the video experience by separating out videos into it’s own section across the site and adding thumbnail previews for all the videos we could get them for. Now if you add a video from YouTube, Google, DailyMotion, Veoh, GoFish, or many other video sharing sites, we’ll go out and see if there’s a thumbnail image and add it for you. This makes it so much more convenient to scan through a list of those viral videos or JAM videos on the Office Spot. We’ve also designed a new layout for the video viewer page that has a larger resolution and a “random video” button. Click on the random video button to watch another video from that spot. Be careful, it can get pretty addictive once you get started! And finally, we’ve added multi-part video submission, so now you can add longer videos that have been chopped into shorter pieces to a spot. We knew how painful it was to have so many videos broken into ten parts and have to find them all one by one. Now you just add all the links to the sequential parts of the video and voila!
The third big area we focused on was making user profile pages much more slick and personalized. Before it was a bit text heavy and there was just so much content that it was overwhelming. We’ve streamlined it so now when you look at another user, you can see a mosaic of their interests. We think the new look is much more visual and fun. If you prefer the old view, just click on the list view on the upper right and you’ll see the original text-list view with medals. We also have a module on the left side for a users favorite links that they’ve saved from around the site. This is a nice way to discover some pretty cool stuff that you might not have noticed before.
One thing many of our users will notice is that the file types are no longer being shown. We found that the majority of the sites that were being submitted were websites and videos. That made it easy for us to separate out videos into its own category and put links to external sites in one place. We felt that choosing a file type for a link was somewhat redundant with adding keywords. A person would tag a site as a forum or photo and then tag it as a forum or photo. We wanted to encourage people to consolidate all of their categorization of a link into the keywords. We’re going to automatically run through all the old links and convert most of the useful link types into keywords which should help with the transition.
We know that change is hard to adjust to and a lot of people just plain don’t like change. Heck, we were pretty stubborn about a lot of things changing at first. But we’ve grown to really love the new Fanpop and we think you will to. Feel free to pummel us with your feedback both positive and negative!
