first thoughts on new site version

there are a few things I don't like about the new site design.

- the ability to sort, such as by price or duration, seems to be gone. this is important if you have clips that need to be associated, because the best way to track them down is to sort clips by duration. all the associated clips will be next to each other.

the artist profile page has info about the artist at the top, and then below it has the portfolio of videos. I do not like this. ultimately people are here to buy videos, but the videos are all beneath the page scroll. I would never promote my artist page because many users will never find the videos. a lot of people, if they are not immediately happy with what they see, just leave ad go somewhere else.

the problem with being able to change pricing for individual clips that have been associated together still exists with the new version. this means of course that I cannot have the varied pricing scheme that I wanted, whereby I wanted people to be able to pay more for higher res clips and less for lower res clips. because now all the clips might be the same price and i can't change it.

I like the "kayak" style menu on the left for advanced search, although i have not tested it yet.

the home page has a nice, clean layout

I don't like the fact that the site does not make full use of the width of the browser. it is very difficult to make a web site that does. however, it has a lot of empty space, and the size of the browser space will grow every year. what I did in the past to solve this is put all the essential stuff on the left, that are necessary for people to use the site, and unimportant stuff on the right (like advertising). if they have a smaller browser window, the worst they lose is some ads.

You can still sort by duration and price with the new version of pond5.