Web site improvements

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.

Comments

[Konstantinos]

John, just a note that the links on the left column come with a blue underline in the latest version of Opera, 8.02.

Also, I'd really like to see that grey text on white background to become black (as in #000000), as I'd mentioned in my Magnatune wishlist. It looks like faded and is kinda difficult to read.

Otherwise, those are great changes/additions that you're doing -- keep'em coming.

[Nathan Jones]

Collections are great - much better than broad genres. It seems to be a feature that is hidden: you only stumble upon links to collections when looking at an album.

Suggestion: You may not want to add a Collections link to the main page, but you could add a note to the top of the Genres page to the effect of "Looking for a sub-genre? See Magnatune's Collections to find music grouped by various styles.".

[Konstantinos]

Nathan's suggestion is excellent.

[John Buckman]

John, just a note that the links on the left column come with a blue underline in the latest version of Opera,
8.02.

Is that new behavior to Opera 8? I've always seen that to be case with
Opera, at least since v6 when I started using it. Opera seems to ignore
the text color directive on the underline part -- not sure why. Firefox,
IE, Safari all obey it.

Also, I'd really like to see that grey text on white background to become black (as in #000000), as I'd mentioned in my Magnatune wishlist. It looks like faded and is kinda difficult to read.

I've been meaning to do that for a while, and your reminder caused me to go
ahead and do it. So now, all the light grey text is actually FFFFFF white, and
all the dark grey text is all 000000 black. My graphic designer won't like
it, but I agree that it *is* much more readable.

-john

[John Buckman]

Suggestion: You may not want to add a Collections link to the main page, but you could add a note to the top of the Genres page to the effect of "Looking for a sub-genre? See Magnatune's Collections to find music grouped by various styles.".

I tend to resist adding things to the home page, because I like it to be very clear and simple, but I do agree with you that the "all collections" page was very hard to find. Also... the collections are likely to grow in number over time, and "all collections" will not be a great way to find specific things soon.

To help things a little, I added a link to "all collections" from the our genres and our artists pages.

Maybe what's needed eventually is a 2-level hierarchy for genres like \metal\progressive vs \metal\thrash ... etc...

-john

I love the fact that you have made the album release dates available, but why are they in the horrible mm-dd-yy format? This format is confusing to those who don't live in North America. For instance, was an album with a date of 4/2/05 released on February 4th or April 2nd?

Could it be changed to something a little more sane? Something like '02 Apr 05' would be much better, and far less confusing to the world at large.

Sorry to be such a pedant about something so trivial, but that date format really annoys me.

[Konstantinos]

John thank you so much for the color changes; as you can see for yourself it now looks much better without making the page look uglier.

Regarding the Opera bug: I have no idea, sorry.

Also: the anonymous suggestion is a good one; "Apr 02, 2005" clearly beats "4/2/2005".

[John Buckman]

I love the fact that you have made the album release dates available, but why are they in the horrible mm-dd-yy format? This format is confusing to those who don't live in North America. For instance, was an album with a date of 4/2/05 released on February 4th or April 2nd?

I agree! I've changed the date format on the popups to "April 5, 2005" instead of 4/5/05.

Thanks for the suggestion.

-john

[David Brown]

Re: 50k of text per page. Consider instead putting things like static navigation HTML or an all musicians list into a JavaScript. JS will use document.write() to output the HTML; use an editor's search-and-replace to escape quotes. Then use a script src= tag to output the HTML where you want it.

Big advantage is that many browsers will cache the separate .js file and reuse the local copy when going from page to page, reducing bandwidth as you need to serve only changing content.

[Brad]

Well, I liked having my band name near the top of every page, but I understand the 50k a page bandwidth savings.

How do the "customers who bought..." stats work? I clicked through everyone who's recommended on my page and only one of them (Arthur Yoria) recommended me. I clicked through just about everything in the Rock genre (which my album is the #1 seller in) and it seemed nobody except Arthur Yoria linked to me. Does everyone who buys my album just leave?

[John Buckman]

How do the "customers who bought..." stats work?

It's a simple database query, which looks at what albums others have bought who have also bought your album, and then lists the 10 most frequent other albums bought by people who bought yours. However, the way the numbers work out, people who frequently buy someone else who buy you, it isn't necessarily the case that the reverse is true, which is what you're finding. These stats aren't tweaked, it's just what the sales numbers really say.

[Art]

John, thanks for sharing all your web-redesign rationales. It shows you care what we think. I think.

I agree with the person who said to dump the grey and go back to black fonts. My feeling is that this is a trend lately trying to be different. Here's a trend: be over 40 - well over in my case, with eyes on the way out. High contrast works; grey fonts suck. Regardless of what your graphic designer says. My take on graphic designers: shoot 'em all! ;>

I like all your "big ideas"... especially the wiki. Get a community behind you. Let people praise and let people bitch. They'll do both, of course. It's great feedback to keep you on the right road.

I've bought 2 CD's and plan to buy many more. Keep up the good work.

[Lora]

The stats are very cool. I'd like to see even greater use of them in conjuction with a revamp of the main page. It's very.... static. And it doesn't offer a lot of information. What I think would be helpful for people is a list of the top selling albmus right on the main site. It gives them a place to start, a sense of what's good. Pretty graphics, a large obvious list of new releases, I think those would give folks places to go when they're trying to find something they'll like.