It’s DJ Techtools’ birthday this week (Thursday!), and I’m excited to give you all a preview of a new look and feel for the site, including a new personalized section, My DJTechTools. Instead of just a preview, think of this as your chance to get involved and provide us with valuable feedback on what you want from your DJ web community.
THE BIG SHIFT
Over the past five years, with your help, we have grown a blog, a forum, and a curated DJ store into the number one DJ site in the world. Each month we host 1 million visitors and are closing fast on one hundred thousand registered forum users. Many people would be content with this achievement, but at DJTT HQ, we won’t stop until this is the most amazing online DJ community in the world.
In the coming months we’ll be launching a series of new features that will build DJ TechTools into a fully integrated online community. You have already seen maps.djtechtools.com, which was our first (and with hundreds of mappings, very successful) web community feature. Now in the future we will be engineering and testing similar services and features that make your DJ life even better.
This week we are rolling out three new elements. Please take this opportunity to check them out and provide us with your feedback:
TUESDAY: NEW UNIFIED STYLE
Since the header style has not changed that much in five years, It’s definitely time for a facelift. We are bringing all of the sites under one new roof, with a common navigation to make all of our sites easy-to-use. This new style is simpler, cleaner, and you should be able to get to any part of the DJ TechTools world from every page. We didn’t want to lose our fun DIY spirit, so each section of the site has its own set of hand-drawn characters and personality.
WEDNESDAY: MY.DJTECHTOOLS.COM
Think about all of the content that is relevant and unique to your personal DJ career:
- Answers to questions you posed in the forum
- Product updates to your gear
- Responses to comments you post
- New articles or news pieces on topics you care about
- Updates to mappings, and personal messages from your friends and collaborators on the site
- Past downloads of free content, or products you purchased
- And much, much more
We think all of this should live in one single, easy to access place, so we’re introducing:
my.DJTechTools.com
Consider this your personal DJ feed of everything that is relevant to you. It’s totally free, all you will have to do is register and tell us a little bit about yourself so we can start tailoring content and information to fit your unique needs. Eventually this profile will be your only login, and will have an associated identity and reputation around the site for everything including the comments, store, forum, and other new community features.
At launch, your My.DJTechTools.com login will only work in maps.djtechtools.com and store.djtechtools.com (not the forum or the comments). Over the next few months we will also integrate the forum, the blog, and the comments so you have a one single login to access everything on the site.
*If you already registered for maps.djtechtools.com, you are good to go! Forum users will need a fresh login.
FRIDAY: A NEW STORE
On Friday, we will be launching a brand new DJ Techtools webstore that will make it really easy to buy things, check on your order, and download products you have purchased in the past. It’s going to be lightning-quick, very minimal and extremely functional! All of this is thanks to our new head developer John, a long time user in the forum and established local San Francisco DJ.
FEEDBACK: WHAT WOULD YOU ADD?
The most important thing we can build are features you need to become a better DJ and get more enjoyment from music. Have any great ideas or know what we can do better? Tell us, and don’t hold back! To all of our expert designers – what are your thoughts on the new minimal look? What about MyDJTT? – what features and community resources would you like to see? If you ran DJTT for a day, how would you make it even more useful and fun?
We’ll read every single bit of feedback that you all share in the comments below – because this site should first and foremost be useful to the users, our readers – you.
