This week THE DROP received a full redesign to more of a magazine layout. After a lot of thinking about how our readers were interacting with the site, one thing was painfully obvious:

There was too much content for readers to grab in any orderly fashion.

As a result we moved to a magazine format allowing for individual categories to get highlighted and a spot for 3 Featured articles. Also in conjunction with the site adjustment the writers are now working on longer features to accommodate the new layout. The group of writers at THE DROP are all music mavens and have banded together to form a consistent place to find the latest and greatest in news across several musical genres.

In just the first few days we’ve seen a HUGE increase in page views, time spent on the site and daily podcast downloads.

Results the month of December 2007 as compared to November 2007 –

Pageviews – Up 32%
Time on the site – Up 234%
Average amount of pageviews per visitor – Up 44%
Monthly Podcast Downloads – Up 47%
Unique Visitors to the site – Up 52%

The user feedback has been really positive thus far. Additional improvements in the coming weeks will be – A music player to listen to THE DROP radio programs, an easy interface to email posts to friends and a few design tweaks.