A few web site improvements went up today. The first change is that all navigation links, such as "also bought" and "collections" have been moved to the left column, which used to have the way-too-long "all artists" list.
This makes the page load quite a bit faster, since the "all artists" list was about 50k worth of html for every page (ouch). It also is much cleaner, so that all that you see on the right hand pane are the artist albums, and the the photo/bio. It also gave me more room to put in some additional useful context-sensitive links (the links all refer to the current artist, rather than being the same on every page). For example, the collections are much clearer this way:
I couldn't decide whether to make a paragraph of the 'also bought' links, like so:
or a simple list. I decided to go with the slightly-messier-looking (but more compact) paragraph formatting.
Now, what's really interesting are the "stats", which tell you how each album by that artist is doing in the various "top albums statistics" that you can find at http://magnatune.com/info/stats/. For example:
Notice how the stats are told in sentences, so as to minimize repeated words, and also so that the most important award is 1st (best selling all time), with the less important ones being parentheticals (best selling this week).
I frequently get complaints that people can't browse easily at Magnatune, and that they're often looking for "the best stuff". Well, the "top selling" stats have been at Magnatune for 2 years, but they're buried in the /info/ section, so this should really help people see what's selling best (or at the highest price) and thus find the most popular things. The new "collections" feature should also help people find similarly-styled music.
Also new today is a complete rewrite of the "tracks" pages, which are now called "details" instead.
The album art is now display at the top right, the total time, and release of the album are displayed. Overall, this is about 1/2 as long, and much cleaner than the old page. The URLs to these pages have changed as well, with the new ones being much shorter, and not having those spaces in the path names (which are seen as %20 in the URL).
A very small change is that the release date of an album is now displayed when you float over the play hifi/lofi/details links, as well as over the magnatune symbol next to the album:
and since people frequently ask me what albums are new at Magnatune, the home page now makes it clear:
Finally, I've added a podcasting FAQ in the /info/ section as well as a Podcasting license type when you click on "license". This is to help promote podcasting use of our music.