We’ve been moving around some stuff…

As you may have noticed by now, our website has undergone a little transformation. We did initially planned to launch a whole new website, but then realized we just love this design too much so we build upon it to make it what it is right now. We hope you like the changes we’ve made! If you have any feedback, comments or questions, please do not hestitate to drop a comment below this post or to send an email to matt@eclecticradio.nl. I’ll be more than happy to help you out or fix any issues you might encounter.

EclecticRadio #ER2012 – What’s new?

1. The homepage

- On the homepage we’ve changed quite some things.The slideshow with the upcoming shows are heavily re-designed, and now all slides are the same layout and consist of the same colours. This makes the website a LOT easier on the eyes, and it makes things much easier to spot and read. No longer does everything shout as loud as possible when you enter our website, but are all items in the slideshow in the red/blue colour scheme and perfectly aligned and positioned.

Also the shows that air today, are positioned first in the slideshow and are wearing the big red ‘That’s today!’ badge. This makes it much easier to see the shows for today without having to browse through all updates in our news stream that came after the announcement that day.

There’s now ONE update per day about radioshows and specials for that day. Read more about that:

- We were tired of reading the same updates about upcoming shows in our news stream, so we moved all the posts related to our radioshows to the center. They no longer appear on the left in the ‘big’ news stream, which leaves room for more and other news. Also we’ve added a small image next to the radioshow updates, so they’re easier to see and identify. We really only need one update per day to announce our radioshows and specials for that day, so grouping those updates in an attractive list seemed a perfect solution.

- We now have a super sexy search bar. It’s no longer positioned below the big slideshow, but tucked away in the main menu – on the right. Clicking it will overlay the main menu with a search bar and you can instantly start typing. Hitting <enter> or the Search button will search for your terms, and close the search bar again so the main menu is revealed again. We thought since you only search when you really need it, you won’t mind clicking an extra button for that. It does look much cleaner than before and having search on the right in the main menu is a logical place.

- We now have ‘Popular posts’. These are posts promoted to this list by either the amount of views, comments and/or shares and reads on social media. This list is updated weekly.

- We’ve removed those ugly ‘tagclouds’ in the below center of the website. Big lists of words with links to related content. We hated those things and according to our statistics so did you, so they’re gone.

- We now have five latest news updates in our news stream, with links to the bottom to the previous page of updates. This makes it easier to go back and forward through our content, in case you missed something.

- We’ve removed the link to the EclecticRadio Hyves page, because well… it’s Hyves. We replaced it with an RSS link so if you want to subscribe to our feed in your favourite feed reader, you can do so here.

2. Schedule

- We’ve got a new radioschedule, and a new radioschedule page as well. It’s located here and it’s automatically updated with the latest shows till now. As you can see there are quite a few new radioshows added to our schedule! We plan on adding even more because we love to have radioshows from all over the world, to reflect our international position and attitude.

- You can now follow the schedule in Google Calendar as well. Just visit this link and check it out. This calendar communicates 1 on 1 with the schedule on our website.

3. Radio shows

- As stated above we’ve launched a lot of new radioshows! We now literally have shows from artists spanning the whole globe; from Czech to the UK, from the USA to Ukraine and from Poland to Greece, we’ve got it all. And we hope you love the new shows as much as we do. We’ve been working hard on selecting the best radioshows for you and our focus was purely on quality, not quantity.

- You just have to check out our sweet new radioshows page here: www.eclecticradio.nl/show/
We love the new layout and boldness of this page. Use the filter above the shows to filter on the shows for today. We know we have to improve upon that but it works for now. Also the order of the time of each show is still off, we’re working on that as well.

- Each show now has a dedicated, actively maintained show page. This way we no longer have to pollute our homepage with updates you’ve all seen a thousand times before but all is now aggregated (packed together) on one single page, which makes it much easier to find all content you want about this specific radioshow.

Some examples

We also owe you a page that introduces all the new DJ’s and all the new radioshows that we’re having now. Expect an update about that soon!

And to close this story, here are some ‘did you know’ facts about EclecticRadio.

4. Did you know…

That this is the 5th big change to our website since launch?
That we started with EclecticRadio in april 2008, but that we were illegal as hell the first half year?
That we made it into a company in September 2008?
That in those 3+ years we grew out to one of the biggest online dance radio stations in The Netherlands?
That we currently hold a firm position with over 65,000 monthly listeners and well over 300,000 pageviews on our website?
That all listeners to our radiostream currently easily use up more than 20 Megabit on data traffic per month?
That our radiostream is powered by PCextreme? (thanks!)
That we feel miserable about the current owners of the domain name eclecticradio.com for not answering our numerous requests to buy that domain name, and that we would love somebody that lives in Bolder, Colorado to visit the office of the current domain owners and ask them friendly to PLEASE sell us that domain?
That we are broadcast partner for the 2012 Dancefair in Jaarbeurs, Utrecht on February 11 & 12? More about that tomorrow!
… That we love Did You Know – lists?

We really love the changes we’ve made to our website and our radio programming. We are working hard to become everybody’s favourite online dance radiostation so if you love us, please tell your friends and if you hate us, please tell us!

Thank you for being a fan, we are looking forward to make your experience with us as good as humanly possible. We do make mistakes (yes, sorry Tim, we do…) but we are humans, and we love to make things right again when we messed up.

Peace to all of you! Have a great weekend and thank you for being a fan, a partner, a provider, an artist, a manager, a recordlabel, a sponsor and most of all: yourself.

Posted on Friday January 20th, 2012 - You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 38 views

Comments: