Bachtrack Contributor Newsletter - June 2008

Bachtrack.com has been live for just over four months, and as you're registered as a contributor, we'd like to tell you what's new. We're making great progress on our journey to becoming the definitive website for classical and opera lovers.

The most important thing, of course, are the visitor numbers, which are growing quickly. In May, we served over 20,000 pages to around 9,000 visitors (up from about 12,000 in April). So please keep inputting your events: they're reaching more and more people, and the more we have, the more people will come to the site to see them.

If you'd like to list your events, but in reality don't have the time, we're now offering to do it for you: just e-mail us an order form (you can find it on this link) with your programme. We charge £5 per event, or £3 per event if there are more than 10 to input.

We've made large numbers of improvements to the public parts of the site, which you can read about in the Site News newsletter: they include maps, league tables, “Listen now” buttons, and a stack of new articles. As well as this, we've been working hard at improving the screens where you input events into the database:

• Picking a venue is now much faster: just type a few letters from the venue name into the new “Containing Box” under the heading “Select venue”
• We've improved support for accented characters (difficult names like Dvořák work fine)
• The number of works in the database is now nearly at 10,000 and growing all the time, and we're continually cleaning them up to make them more consistent. You can find them incredibly quickly by typing a few letters into the “containing” box under “Choose work”: this is a unique feature of our site.
• If you're inputting an opera or any performance that's happening on several nights and/or at different venues, you can add an extra event in just a few mouse clicks.
• You can now input your own kids events. You don't need to do the detailed composers/works/performers input, so the process is extremely simple: click on the user guide for details.

One important thing we've done to the site is to input Google Maps co-ordinates for almost all of the venues, which we've found on the map by hand as accurately. This makes sure they point to your real venue, not just the centre of your postcode, which can be somewhere a mile down the road. Please check yours is correct and phone us if you find any problem.

So come on, have a look at the site and see how much it has changed recently. Decide whether realistically you have got the time to input your events or not: if not fill in the order form and e-mail it to us with your programme: we'll get it done for you quickly and without fuss or error.

With our best regards


Bachtrack.com