Our New Look – April 2011

The Seen and Heard Spring  Makeover:  March/April 2011 (Eds)

It’s Spring here in the UK and so  it’s time for a change  – though the Editors hope you’ll  find this one more to your liking than most of those promised by our politicians.  The old Seen and Heard design has served us very well – our readers seemed to like it – but it had three disadvantages from our point of view. It was  both inflexible and difficult to adapt  to our  changing needs and it was awkward to maintain. Its greatest disadvantage by far however was that it required a  huge amount of manual labour by our Webmasters  simply to keep it up to date.

With often  more than 40 new articles and reviews to add twice weekly these days,  and with having to index every new entry manually, an average upload day with the old design could take up to 6 hours to complete,  a fact that could often delay the publication of some reviews by as long as a week –  or longer if the  review just happened to miss one of our twice -weekly deadlines. We simply had no more time available for updating.

So enter our new shiny design which is built in WordPress and which can be updated daily – or at the very least on the five working weekdays anyhow. WordPress is an amazingly flexible tool too and  a typical review or article can now be set up, then indexed automatically  in several useful ways and even emailed to our readers  in less than a couple of minutes after it has been edited.

We are reasonably sure that most people will find the new design an improvement on the old one but we would still be glad to hear from anyone who doesn’t.  And if readers tell us why they don’t like the changes, we  are also optimistic  that WordPress  – and the Editorial team – will be sufficiently flexible  to overcome  any snags that do show up.

With that proviso out of the way, we are  looking forward to adding new features  to Seen and Heard, to reporting even greater numbers of  musically  interesting venues  and to making some new friends in the process. We might  even take up Tweeting if our readers would like that. Let us know and we’ll certainly look into it.

The Editorial Team. March/April 2011

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