List of Key Improvements to MeFeedia

Over the last couple of months we have made some massive structural, navigation and layout changes to MeFeedia, and we hope *think* you’ll find them to be improvements.

The whole list is far too long to share in a post, but here are some of the highlights.

The Main Differences We Hope You Notice

• Speed – The site now loads 3x times as fast and pages feel more responsive.
• Consistency – The interface works, looks and feels the same on the majority of our 15M pages (or will shortly).
• Usability – Most aspects are working and cleaned up (we do have a bug list a mile long, of course).

New vs Old

People visit MeFeedia primarily to watch video and these changes should make that easier to do.

Structure

We have broken content into 6 main categories:

• Videos- Viral videos, user content, videoblogs and produced content
• TV Shows – Your favorite shows from ABC, NBC, FOX, WB and more
• Movies – A selection of streaming full-length movies, clips, reviews and trailers
• Music – Music videos & music playlists from MTV, MySpace Music, Imeem and others
• News – Most recent news from a variety of sources
• Podcasts – Audio and video podcasts

In addition to the content structure, we fixed a number of underlying scaling & structural issues.

The Listings

Key improvements include thumbnail quality, readability, location on page and extra functionality.

Site Speed Drastically Improved

• Massive reduction in image weight, responsiveness and bandwidth usage
• Reduced HTTP requests by 50% and optimized performance
• Lighter HTML, tableless design – we still have many improvements to make

Usability

• Video player is large (now 640px wide) and higher up the page
• Improved audio player
• Bigger search box
• Organized footer with additional search box
• Contextual sidebars
• “Skip to Content” link brings you right to the content
• “Back to top link” for easier use

Visual Improvements

Visually we have made a far reaching number of changes, while trying to keep hold of the traditional MeFeedia style. We like to think of it as an evolution and hope that our visitors find it easier to use and more pleasing on the eye. Just look at the thumbnails below.

• Improved thumbnail quality, larger format and less banding
• Refined colors and reduced impact of the interface as a whole
• Larger video windows for better viewing experience
• Organization and improvement of sidebars

Company Section

We have created a new company section that includes links to key places which are useful for learning more about us.

• Our Company – Information about MeFeedia as a company
• The Team – Meet the main players on the team
• Press – See what people are saying about us
• Media – If you are a publisher and need information, let us know

Help Section

We have expanded our help section to provide important information to our users.

• Help – A quick way to find helpful information
• The Basics – Discover how to use MeFeedia
• FAQ – Answers to our most common questions
• Profiles – Learn how to manage your profile

The Blog

We have upgraded and moved our wordpress powered blog to blog.mefeedia.com, so subscribe now to keep up with the latest from us. We will be publishing tips for video power users, how to get the most out of the video web and lots more.

Other Stuff

Obviously we can’t cover everything in this post, so here is a mention of a few of the areas we haven’t covered.

• New logo
• More partners
• Thousands more videos
• Search RSS – just add “/rss” to the end of any search page – more about MeFeedia RSS here
• Improved copy
• No sleep, too much caffeine and videos

In The Works

We have a number of features in the works and we’ll publish full details here as they are ready. For now we can tell you that we are working on geotargeting, browser detection and a number of other tools that video watchers and producers should find useful.

So What Difference Has This Made? Well, So Far…

So far we’ve seen a dramatic increase in traffic since the re-launch and we are hoping that means we are going in the right direction so far.

Please let us know what you think via comments or contact us here.

Thanks,

Frank