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DanielNunes93

Gender: Male
Location: Castelo Branco

Am I the only one who hated this update? I just use BEA on the computer and now it has become more confusing, uglier ...

When I registered almost 6 years ago there were several helpful tips in the suggestions forum to make the site better, which the administrator was always saying that went to a list to be implemented after a site redesign, as time went on, BEA always remained the same and now visually looks like a site designed in Paint.

Unfortunately, maybe it's time to look for an alternative ... Sad

PurpleHazel

DanielNunes93 wrote:

Am I the only one who hated this update? I just use BEA on the computer and now it has become more confusing, uglier ...

...now visually looks like a site designed in Paint.

The biggest changes were implemented make the site more phone-friendly. People being able to browse on their phones is necessary for BEA's long-term survival. I do sympathize to a degree because I only browse on my laptop (I don't know about that Paint comment). The forum changes aren't that big and are very close to what a movie forum I frequent did recently.

Hayden

After a few tweaks, I think it'll be fine. Tests for new website designs take time to unwrinkle. And by all means, I'm sure AM would appreciate some suggestions rather than criticisms.

For the time being, on a desktop I'm finding shrinking my browser size makes the site a little easier to navigate.
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craola
crayon master

Location: pdx

anytime there's a change, there's going to be a learning curve. my eyes are a bit confused looking for things, but there are a lot of changes i'm seeing that i like (recently visited, album/track notifications, etc.). there was another one i stumbled on that i'm forgetting now.

gonna have to try it out on my phone to get a fuller picture, i guess.
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lylecatcliffe

Gender: Male
Age: 35
Location: The Home Counties

As horrid and clunky and stretched out on mobile as it is on desktop.

Truly horrendous. Change it back.

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

DanielNunes93 wrote:

Am I the only one who hated this update? I just use BEA on the computer and now it has become more confusing, uglier ...

When I registered almost 6 years ago there were several helpful tips in the suggestions forum to make the site better, which the administrator was always saying that went to a list to be implemented after a site redesign, as time went on, BEA always remained the same and now visually looks like a site designed in Paint.

Unfortunately, maybe it's time to look for an alternative ... Sad

Hi DanielNunes93, all of the ideas on the forums are logged into a change control system and they are dealt with continuously (over 60 changes implemented this year). The mobile-friendly design has taken up much of my time for the past year, and once the various tweaks have been made to improve the layout, we should then be in a position where most of BEA's time can be spent making the bigger functional improvements and making even more progress on the backlog.

Previously 50% of traffic to BEA was on mobile devices, even though the experience on mobile was pretty horrid (particularly on phones where it was almost unusable). Not only that, Google has been penalising websites for quite some time that are not mobile friendly (in their search rankings) and traffic to BEA was starting to decline because people weren't finding it on the first page of Google's search results. Also, people using mobile devices didn't tend to view many pages on BEA due to the difficulty of using the site on those types of devices. I'm hoping that a more mobile-friendly site will result in an increase in people using the site (which will benefit everybody).

The layout of the site will be tweaked over the next few/days weeks to address some of the issues already mentioned such as too much white space on higher screen resolutions etc and the forums will be upgraded as part of the next (bigger) phase of work. I appreciate all feedback people provide as it helps to improve the site. I'm often a bit blind to what needs changing so need prompting sometimes.

CA Dreamin

Gender: Male
Location: LA

I'm not crazy about the redesign, but wouldn't go as far as saying I hate it.

One thing I noticed is on the home page under Chart of the Day, it no longer says who the user is. It only says their #1 album. That's weird, and should revert to the old way imo.

Anyway, the overall new appearance of BEA is fine. But I also find it aggrandized and overly stretched. I find myself scrolling more than anything else. I took Hayden's advice and shrunk my browser size from 100% to 75%. That makes it better. As for the mobile site, these issues are even worse due to the small screen. It takes a while for a page to load, and it's so stretched on the small screen, it doesn't fully load by the time I scroll to the area of the page I'm looking for, making the delay even longer (I could use a new phone, though).

That's interesting that the BEA mobile site had 50% of the site's traffic. I wonder why. It's not really a BEA thing, but the internet in general is more user-friendly on a desktop. But doesn't matter. Accordingly, the mobile site needs the attention. And I'm sure more updates over time will make both the desktop and mobile sites better in the long run. But for now, I think BEA is in transition, and things are in trial-and-error-mode.

benpaco
Who's gonna watch you die?

Age: 27
Location: California

This is a really stupid question but hopefully serves as helpful feedback - I can no longer find "My Charts" (or any of the "profile" sorts of features, frankly) unless I post something and then use my own like signature tag to find them. Is there a profile button somewhere that I'm missing? Also can no longer find my PMs.

I may be (read: am) an idiot, so if I'm just missing something and someone can let me know, that'd be great, but otherwise it would be great to have the "[profile name] [charts] [PMs] [notifications]" sort of bar back above the song quote displaying at the top of the page.
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Romanelli
Bone Swah

Gender: Male
Location: Broomfield, Colorado

Moderator

benpaco wrote:

This is a really stupid question but hopefully serves as helpful feedback - I can no longer find "My Charts" (or any of the "profile" sorts of features, frankly) unless I post something and then use my own like signature tag to find them. Is there a profile button somewhere that I'm missing? Also can no longer find my PMs.

I may be (read: am) an idiot, so if I'm just missing something and someone can let me know, that'd be great, but otherwise it would be great to have the "[profile name] [charts] [PMs] [notifications]" sort of bar back above the song quote displaying at the top of the page.

When it's fixed, those items are shown inside the blue bar at the top of each page.

Patience, y'all!
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Hayden

benpaco wrote:

This is a really stupid question but hopefully serves as helpful feedback - I can no longer find "My Charts" (or any of the "profile" sorts of features, frankly) unless I post something and then use my own like signature tag to find them. Is there a profile button somewhere that I'm missing? Also can no longer find my PMs.

I may be (read: am) an idiot, so if I'm just missing something and someone can let me know, that'd be great, but otherwise it would be great to have the "[profile name] [charts] [PMs] [notifications]" sort of bar back above the song quote displaying at the top of the page.

There's a bug Laughing

If you sign out, it's a pain to sign back in too. Everything should be at the top, but it's missing.
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