One of the things we learn when we are in business is that you need to continually evolve and grow. And that comes in response to feedback from our visitors to the site, our members, and outside forces.
We assembled a small team, consisting of myself, Erin Rado from Celtic Art Store as graphic designer, and Anna Marie Torre Wright from Prancing Pony as chief critic, my wife and partner Joanne Goodman as my support person, and a few other folks and spent the past 3 weeks redesigning the look and feel of Eclectics Marketplace. The goal of this makeover was to introduce some color and variety into the site, without changing its core functionality and purpose.
What you see is the result of numerous long and spirited discussions, late nights, insomnia, and changes on top of changes on top of changes. But the ultimate change, we feel, is amazing.
Some of the changes we made:
- We’ve added a new option to our profiles, we call it ‘Free for Life’. Members can have a basic profile, with a single picture and a single link, along with their full text, free for life. This is to help potential members increase their visibility in at least some ways during this pandemic, without worrying about funding it later. We are keeping our full profile at $30 per year, but even then we are waiving it for the first 200 members for a year as well.
- The old minimal banner was replaced with a more colorful and informative banner.
- Added a warm, inviting background image
- The top menu has been revamped as well, both visually and functionally to make it easier to use.
- Added well over 200 new colorful, category-specific icons for all categories.
- Increased the number of categories to cover more types of products or listings
- Eliminated some ‘explanatory’ text that really wasn’t needed.
- Completely redid the events listings. They are now listed by states, and each type of event has its own specific icon. Check out the listings for CA to get a good idea of what they all look like.
- Edited 400+ images to add a border color (if needed) that fades fairly well into the background image, which eliminates distracting white borders.
- There are a few minor issues that still need cleaned up. Hopefully they will get resolved before we release, otherwise we’ll fix them in-flight.
I’d like to personally thank everyone that supported us in this makeover, because without their help and support we’d never have reached this point. We hope that both our visitors and members like the updated site, and like life itself, as we learn how to do things better, we’ll continue making improvements.
Bruce Goodman for Eclectics Marketplace.