Over the last week or so, we have released a whole load of improvements which have been in development for months. Most of the improvements were suggested or requested by you, and all of them were only built after a testing group of users gave them the thumbs up. I’d like to compare this release to a mullet. Smart at the front, but a real party happening at the back.

Smart at the front:

So, most obviously we have a completely new version of the interface. We’ve transformed every article into a single page spread, with funky new styling and video playlists. The cover page has also been transformed into a “dashboard” so you can get an immediate fix of the articles and videos selected just for you.

To make navigation easier, we’ve added new ways of finding content. Now, as well as idiomag choosing articles based on your taste, you can search through our complete index of articles. In addition, each article has links to external information and other related artists – so you can now explore to your heart’s content!

So we hope you agree that all makes things more usable and engaging.

Party at the back:

Although we love the sexy new interface, the real fun has happened on the back-end. With this release, we have quadrupled our content volume, to around 11,000 articles a month. This includes a whole range of great blogs, and larger partners like Rollingstone.com. So this means you should now get more of the stuff you really like.

And we haven’t just stopped at content quantity, we have (and are continuing to) implement measures to ensure content is ranked by quality, so that we can give you the best we have at any given time. To this end, we have worked hard on our article processing system, to better categorize the articles, especially ones about small independent artists.

Let us know what you think :)

If you would like to spread the idiomag lurve by writing a blog post or writing an article, you can find the official press release here, and screenshots and other assets here.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

4 Responses to “idiomag, rollingstone.com, and a great big mullet-of-a-release”

  1. Idiomag Relaunches Personalized Music Magazine - Keeps Breaking Our Hearts - BuzzYA! Says:

    [...] it’s one of the most awesome ideas we’ve seen in a long time. The personalized music magazine site relaunched today with 4 times more content than ever before and a more traditional, link-intensive page design. [...]

  2. Andy McLoughlin Says:

    I believe the phrase is ‘business on top, party at the back’ ;-)

  3. Scott Gould Says:

    Hey Idio,

    Just to say I love the redesign and the relaunch. I check out the mag everyday and really liked it before, but now I feel like I have far more content at my finger tips.

    Great job Andrew on the post BTW - love the mullet. Is that a photo from your personal collection there?

    Scott

  4. Chuck Darley Says:

    I think the new interface is much nicer. Well done to the idio guys for yet another improvement to this great magazine.

Leave a Reply