Work has begun finally on a new website for freelancesoundlabs which I hope will be easier to navigate, offer some extra features (such as bundled orders) and allow users to manage their downloads and data much easier. 

I have needed to develop a new site for years but have been putting it off simply due to the overwhelming amount of work involved. My current site runs off the Joomla CMS V3 system and has had some ongoing limitations and issues for years. It was originally designed to be an online profile for my DJ and production business but after I began developing preset/browser libraries for both Ableton Push and Komplete Kontrol / Maschine I had to work in some ecommerce and download management features which at the time 10 years ago was not really well thought out. I never thought i’d have more than a handful of downloads but now have close to 1000 downloadable products which is far beyond what the simple download system was really designed for.

In addition, there has been constant problems with accessibility for visually impaired users along with some ongoing problems such as users not appearing to be logged in sometimes and the main issue, Joomla V3 being now End of Life with most of the components I use being incompatible with later versions of Joomla. 

I began work on a new website built on the WordPress CMS system. I have had some experience with WordPress before having had a freelance job assisting in maintaining forums and web pages but learning a whole new CMS web system from the ground up and also testing and modifying the endless list of required plugins that WordPress demands is a pretty challenging task as well as costly. 

WordPress requires approx 20 plugins for the setup I need with each one being about $70-$150 yearly per year to maintain updates which is a lot more than I had to invest for Joomla as much of the basic functionality was built in. I have a few free ones that I can make do with and a lot of custom PHP/CSS code to make certain things work how I need with all design and programming being done by me. 

The hope is for this new site to be far better to navigate and manage the libraries with less clicking needed by users, a nice dark template and easy to read information with what I hope is a much improved experience for the users relyant on accessibility features. I am enlisting some assistance from some of my good users to help test the new site before it goes live and at the time of this post the site is still in development but the core of the site is now tested and working with the following features ready: 

• New dark template design with a similar layout to the old site. 
• Improved login/logout with both popup overlay login and dedicated page via link login and register for better accessibility access
• Fully browsable shopping system:
  • Live update cart system
  • Prevention of purchasing the same library more than once
  • Ability to now select multiple options for libraries that have different versions
  • Ability to bundle together multiple downloadable files for things like VST2 and VST3 versions
  • Downloadable products via account page or direct from any product page
  • Products marked as “Owned” once purchased showing a download button instead
  • Ability to set your prefered currency 
  • Better checkout experience that is designed with accessibility in mind, ability to pay via PayPal or Credit Card directly with additional Apple Pay, Google Pay and possible future options via Stripe
  • Ability for me to setup bundles and additional discounts for larger orders 
• Simple account page with access to all user information, downloads and invoices
• Easily search products via category or tags
• Much faster website loading and page switching
• No more issues with sessions not appearing to be correctly logged in
• Nicely animated pages with ongoing enhancements for responsive resizing (mobile friendly mostly)

Almost everything has been improved with hundreds of hours already being poured into this so I can hopefully offer a better experience. 

A few things to note tho… It will take months for me to manually re-create every page. I could export from Joomla and import to this new site however I wanted to clean up image naming schemes and other small problems so felt it best to manually update each page which will take some time to do and may be ongoing as the new site comes online. 

Another important point I have to clarify is there is no simple way for me to export user purchases to be imported into the new system. I can export all user accounts with a list of what products are owned so this will likely be what I will do to setup user downloads. User accounts should be able to be imported easily enough but unfortunately users will need to send me a message asking for their purchases to be restored and I will have to manually generate an order per user to restore purchases again. Not ideal but I will just have to make that work. 

So just thought I would post this note as the first news story on the site. Other useful posts from the old site will also be bought over in time.