I thought I would share the process that I went through for the CoverHunt2.0 redesign. I started this site about 2 years ago when I needed a way to find cover artwork for my iTunes music collection. If you’ve bought a CD and ripped it to your computer it is great to have the artwork, especially since the new iPods and iPhone let you browse by cover.
Since then it has grown to be one of the most popular CD cover search sites on the web with almost 10,000,000 searches in the past year. This is what it looked like.
Late 2008 I thought it was time for an update. The goals were to make the pages look better and to give the layout some more flexibility for further expansion in the future. The changes needed to be simple enough that it actually happened, since I’d talked about it too much already!
Everything starts on paper, so here is the final of a number of sketches. Even this turned out to be too complicated, so I removed a few things even from that. I can always add them again later but that will be a separate project – this current project needs to be as simple as possible if it is going to happen.
Once the sketch was finalised it was time to develop the new code. I ended up doing it myself, but I could have easily put it on Rent A Coder if I didn’t have time to do it myself. Here is the final result.
Next, results – it is very important to check the stats to see what effect any changes have. I added new ad tracking channels and they were all stable so that was good. The traffic was slightly up, also good – and the feedback from the fans was good too.
Since I was on a roll I got started on the next iteration straight away – adding comments to each album page using Disqus. That was a simple copy and paste piece of code that took 5 minutes. Sure it doesn’t have any SEO benefit because it isn’t fully coded into the page but the fact that it was running in 5 minutes is much more powerful than that – if anyone actually writes comments I can get somebody to code it properly in a few weeks time.
Project complete!
Remember, big sites start small – so go get started and create a simple web platform that can make amazing things happen.
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