It’s been a little while since the relaunch of Anime Picks in March. The response to the release was better than we could have hoped, with a significant increase in traffic and great feedback. We’re over the moon with the growing success for the magazine. But, for us, we won’t ever be happy until Anime Picks becomes the default site for any anime lover. We have some way to go yet, and have been listening very closely to all feedback.
We’ve had an opportunity too to take stock of the elements of AP that work best, and review those that don’t work so well.
Content
We’ve commissioned new artwork, and we’re looking at expanding many sections of the magazine. While we have a fairly steady stream of excellent articles from various contributors, we’re pushing for more varied content.
Magazine design
A competition held earlier in the year helped generate some fantastic ideas that we’re planning on pulling into a refreshed design magazine. Rather than a whole new design, we’re revisiting and improving the layout we introduced in March.
Anime Pick refreshed design
A few of the things we have planned:
- Improved menus
- Refreshed graphics
- New content page layouts
- New content page menus
- New ‘social’ and ‘subscription’ areas.
Video
The video content hasn’t seen much love, and we have a project under way to deliver new videos over the coming months.
Technology
I was keen from the start to maintain AP at the cutting edge of web tech, without jeopardising cross-browser support. The up coming release takes us to the next level, with considerable refactoring of the WordPress templates under the hood to move us to full HTML5 support and the latest version of jQuery. We’re dropping support for older versions of Internet Explorer. The magazine shines in Chrome and FireFox.
These updates don’t change much visibly, but they help build a wider, more stable foundation for future updates (of which we have many planned).
Future
We have many plans, and time and advertisers willing we hope to continue the expansion of Anime Picks over the next few months and into 2012. It goes without saying that it’s a project the entire team is passionate about and would very much like to see it succeed. I’m really enjoying the fine-details of wrangling the technologies to get this to work. As a play-pen Anime Picks couldn’t be much more varied and fun, but as always with the nature of unpaid projects, time and resource are always outstripped by our ever-growing wish-list!
