Today, BestEverAlbums.com celebrates its 21st anniversary (and is finally old enough to buy a drink 🍺).
Over the past year, BEA has undergone its most extensive period of development to date, with hundreds of improvements designed to make the site easier to use, more engaging and more useful for discovering, ranking and discussing music.
A better experience across devices
The site has been substantially modernised, particularly on mobile, with improved navigation, a better login experience, dark mode, accessibility improvements and enhanced PWA features. BEA should now be more enjoyable to use whether you’re browsing on a phone, tablet or desktop.
More ways to connect with other members
Forums and comments have become much more interactive, with reactions, user mentions, threaded discussions and richer formatting. It’s now easier to join conversations, bring other members into discussions and follow what people are saying about particular albums, artists and charts.
Easier to keep up with what you’ve missed
New activity streams bring together recent activity from across the site, including chart updates, messages, mentions and other member activity. Expanded notifications also make it easier to stay connected and catch up on what’s happened since your last visit.
More interesting and informative charts
Charts now provide much more insight into how rankings are changing, including biggest climbers and fallers, new entries and leavers, chart history and configurable time periods. Improved chart information and selected comments provide more context around the rankings and more ways to discover new music.
Better music discussions and discovery
Helpful comments are now surfaced more prominently, while improved connections between forums, comments, albums, artists and charts make it easier to discover what other BEA members think about the music you’re exploring.
There’s still plenty more planned. Over the coming year, the focus will continue to be on improving music discovery, strengthening the community and making BEA an even better place to explore, rank and discuss music.
BEA has now been online for 21 years, and the site wouldn't have reached this milestone without the members who have spent countless hours creating charts, rating albums, contributing data, writing comments, discussing music and helping to improve the site.
Thank you for being part of the community. 🍻
AM _________________ Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify
Hey Album Master, this has literally been a life changing website for me and gotten me into so many artists I had never heard of. I recently discovered the windows app and it is very smooth, I had been just using the web browser version. Thank you so much for all the hard work to make the site better every month! _________________ Stupid people do stupid things, smart people outsmart each other.
21!! Wow! Congratulations to you and thank you for giving us this wonderful home base for musical discussion and discovery.
Having been part of the site for about 12 of those years, I’ll echo an sentiment already offered in this thread: this website changed my life and continues to be such a great resource in my life today.
Thank you, AM, for the dedication as well for the continued and committed updates, the positive and not so (of which, I’ve noticed the updates are consistently more positive than a year or so ago!)
All respect! Thanks again. _________________ Attention all planets of the solar federation: We have assumed control.
21!! Wow! Congratulations to you and thank you for giving us this wonderful home base for musical discussion and discovery.
Having been part of the site for about 12 of those years, I’ll echo an sentiment already offered in this thread: this website changed my life and continues to be such a great resource in my life today.
Thank you, AM, for the dedication as well for the continued and committed updates, the positive and not so (of which, I’ve noticed the updates are consistently more positive than a year or so ago!)
All respect! Thanks again.
Thanks, much appreciated! Working on the site can be frustrating at times, and progress certainly doesn't always go in a straight line. There have been plenty of challenges over the years, many of them financial, and simply keeping the site running hasn't always been easy.
About a year ago, the site was badly in need of modernisation. It still is in many respects, but I do feel a lot of progress has been made since then. One thing I've come to realise is that the site will never really be finished. No matter how modern it becomes, if it's left alone for too long, it will inevitably start falling behind again.
It's interesting looking back at some of my own posts from a couple of years ago, when I wasn't able to commit sufficient time to the site. I've since realised that keeping everything moving forward really is a full-time job, not just developing new features, but maintaining and polishing all the less visible areas that people probably take for granted.
There are still plenty of challenges ahead, not least the changing internet landscape and the impact of AI on independent websites. It's difficult to predict how things will evolve, but I'm hopeful that BEA can continue to find its place in all of that.
Despite the challenges, I'm probably more optimistic about the site's future than I have been for quite some time. There's still an enormous amount I'd like to do, and it's encouraging to see the progress that's been made over the past year.
Anyway, thanks again for the kind words and for sticking around for so long. Knowing that the site has meant something to people over the years makes all the effort worthwhile. _________________ Bluesky · Facebook · Spotify
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