the Designer Pages blog

After a very busy summer, we have a lot of updates coming to our users the next couple of weeks, beginning with today, August 28, 2010. Starting at 3pm EST, we’ll be taking the site down while we deploy these updates. DesignerPages.com will be back online no later than Sunday morning, August 29, 2010. What’s new? 3rings has been redesigned from the ground up, and product detail pages have a totally new look.

3rings

3rings has really come a long way since first launching in early 2009. To date, 1,864 articles have been published by 19 contributors, with 3,255 comments. We’ve explored various article formats and mediums, featuring product trends in a wide array of industry segments: contract, residential, kitchen and bath, lighting, surfaces, and green. And after a lot of dabbling here and there, we’re confident that the new 3rings will deliver all this content to you better than ever before.

Specifically, our readers have asked for bigger images, and now you’ll have them. Each article has a Twitter and Like button so readers can easily share content with their favorite social communities; at the bottom of each article you’ll see even more share buttons for Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, Bebo, Technorati, and more. In the same spirit of being more social, commenting is now powered entirely by Disqus, so you can see comments across other web publications that have been posted by our 3rings readers.

Last but not least, videos will be clearly marked and easier to find. This is probably one of the most meaningful updates in my view, being that we’ll be investing in more and more video work each week. You can expect to see weekly video showroom tours and regular video interviews with your favorite product designers. In the mean time, here’s our most popular video to date - Live at Design Miami: Wouter Scheublin’s Walking Table - recently averaging 100k+ plays per week.

Product Detail

As for the DesignerPages.com product detail page, this initial update is the first of many deploys to come. Up until now, products on DesignerPages.com have really only been about information provided by manufacturers. And that’s still meant to be a major piece of the puzzle. But moving forward, we’d like to think of products as the subject of a story (it’s okay for you to begin conjuring up your favorite Disney fairytale protagonists). In that regard, we need to serve as storytellers to help communicate the narrative. What you’ll see launch tonight or tomorrow, is the base for this new approach, the book cover if you will.

Perhaps the first tactical example of storytelling, which will go live with this new update, is the “Featured in these Collections” module on product detail pages. For those not familiar, we’ve been developing a feature/program somewhat in hiding, Collections, which are public groupings of products curated by community members. Collections may be groupings of products for a project, a concept, a trend, a fascination, anything really. On point, we’re finally bringing Collections more to the foreground so as you’re looking at a particular product, you can see what Collection(s) it’s already been added to. Here are some examples of products that are already included in Collections: Fat Sofa, Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, and Waterfall Clear Patterned Glass. Note: Collections are still in beta, so if you’d like to be a curator, please email us at info@designerpages.com.

Other updates, we’ve included share buttons, so you can email products to friends, post products to your Facebook wall, or post products to Twitter. We really want to help catalyze more user-generated publishing in this industry, in particular, content about products of course. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll begin to aggregate these Facebook and Twitter posts to display on the product detail pages so our community can quickly find this wide commentary, but that’s a horse of a different color (or at least a blog post of its own that I’ll write in September).

And probably the biggest update, at least feature wise, My [Saved] Products is no more. We decided that “Save Product” and “Add to Workspace” were really too similar to maintain as separate features. So for all of you that have previously saved products, we’ve created a workspace for you named Saved Products and have moved all past saved products into that workspace. Moving forward, if you want to save products, you’ll have to save to a workspace. Again, you can create as many workspaces as you want, and best of all, you can share workspaces with colleagues, friends, everyone and anyone. If you have any specific questions regarding this feature update, feel free to email Avi (avi@designerpages.com) or me (jacob@designerpages.com). We’re here to save the day.

That’s all for now. Happy product hunting. Enjoy the end of Summer.