New look and improved functionality

We deployed Beta2 of the site last Monday but a few problems have held us up. Most of the big clangers are now fixed  and I’m going to start issuing more invites today. Even if you are not a Beta Tester, head on over to loudervoice.com to check out the very slick new look.

In terms of functinality, the main focus was on usability and stability. There are not many visible new features there compared to Beta1. The most visible changes are that all actions on results are “in-situ” rather than sending you off to different pages.

We’ve already got some great feedback from users particularly about our bete noir “the writer screen”. After some long thought over the past week, we now have an approach in mind which should suit most people.

I issued the first rough spec for the Full Release yesterday and hope to close that asap. You won’t see large scale changes to the site in Full Release, just improvements to what is already there.

It’s going to be another busy month in March and I can’t wait to unveil the finished site. In the next three weeks you can expect the following: the WordPress plug-in will finally be made available and we’ll start allowing beta testers to publish to their own blogs rather than to our reviewblogs site.

Oh and we’ll be updating this blog, reviewbogs and the signup page with the new look as soon as we can.