Welcome to the all-new Soul Discovery.
After many years of hard work and loyal service our old server and website was feeling the strain. It was no longer keeping up with the demands of a modern online experience. The website had become bloated, slow and often dropped connections making for a frustrating user experience. Our podcast was failing to keep pace with requests made on it by cutting edge streaming and content delivery services, and although our more recent shop addition was still hanging in there, it was only a matter of time before that too started to suffer.
We, therefore, last year, took the decision that it was time to move on, and so we set about thinking about what a new (version 4 for anyone who’s counting!) and modern Soul Discovery would look like.
We are proud and very lucky to have been able to offer and run this service for you for over ten years. In that time we have grown, made a few mistakes, met some extraordinary people and learned a few things along the way about what works for us, what makes for a good experience and what resonates well with our audience.
The decision reached was that the design needed to be clean, the experience simple and technology fast. The website needed to be easy to navigate, more consistent across different devices and platforms, focussed on the content that interests you and provide a quick and simple way for you to access it. We wanted to be light on, and if possible, free of adverts and importantly befitting as the number one destination for rare and undiscovered music, stories and news from the world of Soul, Jazz and R&B.
Crucially, it was imperative for us to continue to be a suitable trusted home for artists, producers, labels and fans alike, to share their stories, experiences and love for the music that connects them across the world.
Soul Discovery has been completely reengineered from scratch to provide a scalable, cutting-edge home to carry Soul Discovery forward into the second quarter of this century.
And so, over the last few months we’ve been hard at work giving our website a complete ground up redesign and rebuild. This new Soul Discovery has been completely reengineered from scratch to provide a scalable, cutting-edge home to carry Soul Discovery forward into the second quarter of this century. You will still find our blog, podcast and shop right here, where it has always been, but now better organised, visually better structured and smoother.
Some improvements we have introduced include:
- New, cleaner and more modern UI design.
- Simpler and smarter website navigation.
- New blog design to make finding and reading articles simpler and more enjoyable.
- Podcast Show Episodes and Guest Interviews split into two new separate podcasts, so you can now listen to each as a series without the interruption of the other.
- All new content filtering capabilities to help you focus on content that interests you.
- Simplified shop structure.
- Improved mobile device compatibility.
- New engineering design to be able to better serve third party podcast services.
We hope you find the new Soul Discovery a pleasurable experience.
If you have any suggestions for any features you would like to see added or find yourself having any difficulties in accessing any of the content on offer please do get in touch. This new platform also now allows us to better explore some ideas we have been thinking about for a while, so keep an eye out for new features and functionality as we roll it out over the coming weeks and months.
We hope you continue to enjoy reading, listening and making discoveries with us.