A few weeks ago we unveiled SoundUnwound's snazzy new look, including a radically overhauled artist page, and we're delighted that so many of you seemed to approve of the changes: either directly by telling us, or indirectly by using the site more! We have another big exciting new feature planned, but while that’s in longer-term development , we know we have to keep tweaking and improving what we’ve got.
So let us tell you about a bunch of little changes which we think collectively make a big difference to the SoundUnwound experience!
Firstly, we’ve introduced a couple of editing guideline pages. There’s a basic guide, which is quick to read and easy to digest for beginners wishing to find out more about the editing process; and then there’s a much more detailed field-by-field guide which explains just about everything for our more committed editors. We hope these pages will help you understand the decisions our moderators make about your edits, and ultimately that’ll mean more accepted edits and better quality content.
Also, we’ve added MP3 players to our genre pages, so that you can listen to examples of genres while you read about them and explore similar artists. So, if you want to know what Industrial sounds like, or Post-grunge, or Progressive Metal, you don’t have to just read about it and imagine – you can listen to samples on the MP3 player in the top-right corner. And if you disagree with any of the choices, you can help shape them by genre voting across the site.
We’ve also added an MP3 player to the homepage: when a featured artist has MP3s available, you’ll be able to listen to them through the player just below the photo. You might also have noticed we’ve added tabs to our homepage news stories too, so you can select which one you want to read, easily see when a new story has been posted, and even email any stories you like to friends or family because they now have unique URLs (click on the name in blue and then copy the link from your address bar).
Elsewhere, we’ve made improvements to how we deal with ASINs, so that, for example, if you add an ASIN from France's Amazon store, Amazon.fr, we're now able to import their MP3 samples too. ASINs are the unique 10-digit codes Amazon gives to each product that allows SoundUnwound to import cover art, track listings, MP3 coverage and more. You can find the ASIN for any Amazon product in the address bar URL - music releases usually start with B00.
As ever, we’re always keen to hear your thoughts on SoundUnwound, including any comments on the new design or any of the improvements mentioned above - let us know your feedback!
Team SoundUnwound
Team Sound Unwound U Rock
Posted by: Joseph | August 11, 2009 at 03:45 PM