It's been over a year since the initial launch of DesignersCouch.org. In a year a lot can happen. For instance, in the course of one years, we've had almost 10,000 designs submitted to our galleries, over 1,000 creatives join our ranks (and many more have applied), we've gone from a few unique page views per day to over 1,000, and more. It's been a fun ride, but we're always looking for bigger and better things on the horizon.
That's why over the course of the last few months (although this change has been long awaited), the DesignersCouch team has been working laboriously on the next version of our humble abode. That's right, something we fanboys like to call "DCv2."
With the amount of time, research, and development that has gone into the making of the new site alone, we feel that our creatives - our community - need to be kept abreast of the latest developments. So, here are our reasons (completely justified in our minds, and the minds of many out there) of why we redesigned (and not realigned) DesignersCouch.
Expanding our Audience
We love analytics, and they always prove to be more useful that the ways we initially use them for. One thing our analytics taught us was that the audience we were attracting wasn't necessarily the one that we expected. We learned that the majority of our audience was young, and visited from school. This was strange when we compared our stats to our competitors who seemed to be gaining traffic from a more mature design audience. While this stat was one that excited us, it didn't change from our initial community goals to be a professional community of creatives. While it was great that our audience was young, we wanted there to be a balance so that the young can learn from the older (sometimes) more experienced creatives. We found, then, that the dark design turned off older users. This was for a number of reasons, albeit too funky of a design, being harder to read, or them just being put-off by it. To expand our audience, we went with a lighter design; one that would appeal to every segment, young and old. Don't worry, we still kept a little bit of our funk, too (just not the smell)!
A Simpler Way to Become a Member
DesignersCouch has always established itself as a quality creative community. That's why we approved members based on their portfolio - and that's something we don't want to change. However, our previous system just took too long to get through. You had to apply, and wait to be approved. One thing we definitely know about users: they don't like waiting. In the new version, we've literally tossed out all of that to make becoming a member easier. We took a new [BLOCKED] tool we'd been neglecting and decided to borrow from what many sites are doing with private memberships. Now to gain membership you have to be invited by another member. No waiting. No hassles. Now the community decides who can be a part of the community. So simple we don't know why we didn't think of it before.
The Bigger The Better
The old design of DesignersCouch had frustratingly small thumbnails in our gallery that made it tough to get a decent preview. We wanted to enhance the user's experience by giving them nice big previews before they make the click. We've made the thumbnails so large, though, that some designs don't even require a full-view - but we still recommend checking them out in this because we reworked the full view page as well so it's cleaner and easier to stay focused on what you clicked on!
Improved Navigation
Our previous version's navigation was so seamless that it was even featured on Smashing Magazine, which we thought was pretty wicked. However, while we like to think the bigger the better, less is also more. So we de-cluttered the interface, and made everything more focused so you don't have to click as many times to do stuff as you would have needed to before. Our simplified navigation gives us room for bigger text and helps make content pop-out much more than in the old design where it tended to get lost.
An Excuse to Clean Up
After watching and using the site ourselves, we saw that some features were just plain unnecessary. Features like collaborations, events, and more just cluttered the user experience. To bring focus and simplify usage, we removed a ton of unused features.
A Reason to Add More Features
Our favorite part of the new DesignersCouch is the new and improved backend. We've completely re-designed and re-developed it. You can now select multiple designs, and submitting designs is much easier We've also added a few features that we think are much more useful. For example, we added Collections, where designers can collect designs from anywhere on the Internet for their inspiration. Members can also collect that same design in their own Collections - think of it like sharing cool designs you found offsite with others. Don't worry, though, measures have been put in place to ensure that the original designers get full credit and a trackback.
Improved SEO
The previous website broke every SEO rule known to man, as made clear in Google Analytics. For a site that gets over 10K unique hits daily, it was poorly indexed in Google. So we hired Powered by Search to tell us what the hell we were doing wrong. There was a long list. Everything from not having optimized titles, to having poor URL architecture have been resolved making our site easier to find on your favourite search engines.
Content is and Always will be King
One thing we noticed about the old DesignersCouch was a ridiculously high bounce rate. There were a multitude of factors that affected this, but the new design is geared towards eliminating the source. Our old design didn't focus on content and cluttered it so the main page lacked focus. In the new design, DesignersCouch is clearly focused on one thing: the designs our Creatives have submitted. We want to highlight the works of our Creatives and give them the exposure they deserve.
Better Content
While we designed the site to present content in a sexier way than ever before, the new DesignersCouch is taking it's content to the next level. We brought on the creative talents of James Costa from The Phuse to focus on higher quality articles that challenge and inspire.
More Ways to Pay the Bills
With the outstanding growth of DesignersCouch, our bills skyrocketed. All that money being incurred by the team, we needed to figure out a way to break ourselves even. Having placed ads late in the last version of DesignersCouch, we weren't happy with how they looked, simply because the site wasn't designed to have them. Our new design makes room for several ad spots that we're happy to have help pay for our bills. Don't worry, though, we know that no one likes ads so we've teamed up with the wonderful folks at BuySellAds to carefully figure out unobtrusive ways to implement these ads. Advertisers will be happier that their ads look nicer in the design, and users will be happy that the ads support a community that is continually growing.
So, what do you think of the new design? :-)
