Hi folks. It's been a while since we've talked about the new site, so here's an update on how we're doing and what you can expect. Apologies up front if this gets long, but I don't want to leave anything out and have you wondering what's going on.
The new site looks great, if I may say so myself.
We're all super-happy with how it turned out and the upgrades we're doing -- both behind the scenes and out in "public view." If I had to guess, I'd say we'll be ready to launch the new site in about 2-3 weeks. But that's a guess and we're still working hard on many things.
When we launch, the address will remain the same --
www.atu2.com. You'll visit us one day and suddenly discover the new site. Some of you may have trouble accessing the new site due to technical things like web caching and DNS propagation. We'll try to post a workaround for those of you who are affected by that.
I've already mentioned that the main public upgrades are related to our news coverage: you'll be able to search the full text of our 5,000+ U2 news articles covering the band's entire career; we'll start archiving all our Bits & Bytes posts so you can find them easily in the future; we'll add Bits & Bytes to the RSS feed; etc. -- we'll post a list of the new stuff when we launch. (The main behind-the-scenes upgrades involve getting us on a newer, faster, and more stable server, and upgrades to the databases that run @U2.)
We'll also be getting rid of some sections of @U2 -- these are parts of the site that stats tell us very few people visit, parts of the site that we've found hard to update consistently, etc. Here's a list:
PIX @U2: We'll still have a photos section on the new site, with separate pages for the band and each band member. But we stopped putting photos on @U2 many years ago, and started putting them on Flickr. So some of the existing photos in our PIX section now will go away. The new photos section will import photos from Flickr.
COLLECTORS: This is one section we've been unable to keep updated in recent years. It will be going away. Much of the content has already been stripped. For example, we've given away the
Autograph Guide to U2 East Link, who are doing a great job keeping it fresh.
FANZONE: This section gets very little traffic (in part, no doubt, due to lack of updates in recent years).
MULTIMEDIA: Ditto. Although, I should say that I'd really, really like to rebuild the U2 Wallpapers/Desktop Images section and add it to the new @U2 some day in the future. The other material in this section has long since ceased to be useful.
LINKS: Unfortunately, the Links database has been overrun by spammers submitting sites in the hopes of getting free links from our web site. We've put anti-spam measures in place, and they find ways around them and clog up the system. This will be going away completely. We do, however, continue to link out regularly to other U2 sites in our news coverage and on our blog, and we link to U2 tribute bands regularly via our Calendar.
So that's where we're at. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below. Thanks for reading, folks.
Matt
Update on New @U2 web site