You asked, and you have received..
Yep, it's official! We're back and better than ever! I hope you're excited, because I know we all are. This redesign has been in the works for several long months now, and personally, it feels great to be able to take it live today and share it with the world. But enough chit-chat! Let's take a look at what's new:
Design- Fundamentally: New design/colour scheme/layout!
- Further to the above, this therefore means much faster page loads.
- Much more sleek and compact display to remove the overcrowded nature of the past design.
- CSS-friendly layout that complys much better with web standards.
- New images (news story icons, etc).
- More reviews available to read (both on the sidebar and in the '2005 Reviews' link.
- Related reviews within existing ones (Like Xiu Xiu? Good! So do we.)
- Easy access search feature.
- Staff profiles with up-to-the-minute information (latest reviews, features, etc)
- Ability to sort review pages by Record Label (!!), and Year of Release.
- Ability to see all of a reviewer's work in a single click.
- NEW! Mailing List: Sign up and get email notification when we've got big updates coming up.
- New news categories.
- New feature ideas (see Kevin's Music History above).
- Much more efficient database usage (from 80MB to 8).
- Faster queries due to optimized table structure.
- Much better control over layout due to complete re-coding.
- More news posting ability for other users.
- More integrated admin control over content.
So there you have it! It's been a long, tough road to get to this stage, including multiple staffers editing every review on the site (619 at the last count) to remove weird characters that showed up, add in record label/release date references, as well as learning completely alien programming languages, and having to figure out the concept of databases. While we're very proud of the new look, there's no guarantees that every single bug has been ironed out yet, so if you do run across anything weird, please take a moment to email me saying where you came from and what happened.
Anyway, enough talk: click around, enjoy the new site, register on the forums if you aren't already (and why not?) and sign up to the mailing list to get EXCLUSIVE SPB INFO first! We won't spam you or anything, fear not. Any feedback you have can go in the forum, or if it's, uh, personal, mail it to me as linked above. Oh, and if you're curious as to how the site has looked over the years, or just an older reader with a poor memory, check out the about page for a trip down memory lane.
Enjoy!
