It’s official – Artsopolis version 3 is now in Beta, and taking a live shakedown cruise. The development team has been working very hard to improve every area of the site, from our new google-style search, to our faster displaying pages, to our totally redesigned navigation system, allowing you to more quickly find what you’re looking for.
And that’s not the best of it!
Over the next couple of weeks, we will be rolling out a series of new features that we got from your feedback; many will allow the site to reach out to you to keep you informed of all of the great Arts & Cultural events Silicon Valley has to offer. You can check back here – we’ll let you know as they go live.
For the time being, the development team can use your help – if you see something not working as it should, please let us know! Use the “Report an Error” link in the upper-right corner of any page to send us a quick comment on what you saw wrong, and how you think it should work. Then we’ll go fix it! We’re sure a few website bugs have escaped us, but with your help, we’ll track them down quickly.
Thank you for your continued support of Arts & Culture and Artsopolis; welcome aboard!
-Ron Evans, Lead Developer, Artsopolis
Good job guys! Lookin’ good!
You guys already do such a great job helping out arts and cultural groups in Silicon Valley – this is icing on the cake!
What a great new look — it packs in a ton of information and photos without being cluttered. Love the “Featured Video” section, too.
Unfortunately, more difficult to navigate than the previous. When trying to find events by date, it returns 14 pages of events with no way to break down by category. Meaning I have to click through pages of “Toddler Storytime” just to find if there is street fair somewhere on the peninsula or the south bay. The advanced search function is so specific that you already need to know the event in order to find it. Additionally, a general search for Music events on Sunday, June 17th returned “no results”?!? Search functions can’t distinguish between ongoing programs and specific weekend events, meaning more paging through an endless series of long term exhibitions just to find something that only lasts this weekend and I wouldn’t want to miss. Very hit-and-miss. Sorry to be so negative, but getting up on a Sunday morning and trying to find a fun event for the day was pretty frustrating. Good luck on refining the site.
Hi Clayton,
First, THANKS for the feedback! I agree with you – we are still working out some big areas, especially in the area of search results, which I think we all agree is a major (if not THE major) aspect of Artsopolis. To address your concerns specifically:
1. Folks seem to like the old way of breaking down search results by category. So we’re going to go back to that format for advanced search results. Give us a couple of days to get it into the system, but it is going back in.
2. No music events for Sunday, June 17th – a puzzlement. There may be a bug in the way search results are being displayed. I’ll be troubleshooting this.
3. Ongoing programs mixed in with regular results – I agree, this is annoying. We’re thinking “ongoing” events should be listed separatly, at the end of the list of events, and clearly called out as ongoing – so if you want to look thru them, you know what you’re looking at, ya know? Be looking for a fix to this as well.
Don’t worry about being negative – frustration with a website does that! And we don’t want you to be frustrated. Every new site goes through some “growing pains,” and we’re working hard to minimize them as folks transition to the new system. Stick with us, help us grow, and keep sending us that feedback!
I’ll update here once these issues have been dealt with.
Thank again!
Ron
What happened to all the free events? That section used to be full of activities all very well organized.
What would be really amazing, and helpful, is if the “What’s Nearby” tabs could actually include other art related venues and not just restaurants and hotels.
The layout looks good, but it takes too much time to load the pages probably because of the icons & photos.
I’d rather see a list of events and not see the photo for the event until I actually click on that event. The way it is set up now only so many events fit on one page and I have to keep clicking on page after page. That takes a lot of time to load only to find out it is not the page you want.
Also, instead of repeating an event, for example: Cinema San Pedro Square, why don’t you list all the upcoming movies for that venue.
I agree with the person who said we are not interested in the hotels and restaurants nearby. It would be more helpful if we had locations for parking or nearest VTA bus number.
But overall, I like the changes. Is there anyway you can help out Yahoo. When they made changes it was for the worse. Glad to know you are listening.
Dear Webmaster,
Thanks for trying to improve the Web site. However, compared to the old Web layout, this beta version is much, much slower. Also, if you do a search, then click on an event, and then hit the back button, it says the data is stale, and you’ve lost the search page. Is there a way to invoke the original Web layout?
Thanks.
Well, looks like I have a couple of comments to respond to!
Clayton – all of the fixes I spoke about above are in! Search results for date searches are now broken down by category, just like the old site. This is by far biggest feature request we have received. Also, the missing music events are showing up, and ongoing events are sorted to the bottom of date search results. More improvements coming along this line.
To Irene: Free events are back! You can do a date search for this weekend using the advanced search, or just click on the free events tab. We’ll soon convert free events back to a line listing, since there are so many to look at. Stay tuned.
To Anonymous: (if the “What’s Nearby” tabs could actually include other art related venues and not just restaurants and hotels.) – It’s coming!
To Karyn: (layout and speed questions) We’re working on optimizing the speed that pages display. We’ve been able to crank it up about 20% faster since launch, and will continue to optimize. VTA would be great – we’ve wanted to work with them for awhile. I’ll bring this up with the staff. And we’d certainly chat with Yahoo if they wanted to sit down with us!
To Ron: YES. There is a bug with the system not keeping your search infomation in it’s brain when you go off to another page. We’ll get a fix in for it shortly; thanks for letting us know about the problem!
As always, keep those cards and letters coming in!
and THANK YOU!
Ron Evans, Artsopolis.com