Friends,
Last week, we launched a new design for agoodmovietowatch.com.
The old design:
The new one:
(How much better does that look!)
Other things we’ve been able to do
Other than funding the redesign for the website (for the first time in its six-year history), premium subscriptions to this newsletter have allowed us to:
Remove about 90% of ads on the website for everyone, not just premium users. This offers a faster, cleaner, and less distracting movie discovering experience.
Invest more in server resources to update Netflix availability. Before, the information on whether a movie is available on Netflix or not (across all countries) was retrieved only once a week. We’ve been able to move that to once a day, which is the same frequency at which Netflix updates its catalog.
Add more sorting features to Seen, Loved, Queue, and Not Interested lists on the website. This was a recurring request from many of you, and I’m happy we could deliver on it it.
Cover more than 130 new movies and shows.
Take the newsletter from once-weekly to twice-weekly. Premium users get a second e-mail every Wednesday with a top mid-week streaming recommendation.
Buy food to eat! Your subscription fees go directly to the people that contribute to the project.
- Thank you all so much for subscribing and for reading. -
A few words on the new design
As we thought about removing ads and asking for your direct support through newsletter subscriptions, there was one big question looming in the background: what does a website that doesn’t care about ads look like?
And by extension, what does a website that’s 100% tailored to viewers’ needs do?
A talented user experience designer, Sheena (http://sheena-antonios.com/), volunteered her time to take on these questions. Her approach was simple yet brilliant: let’s ask the people who use the website themselves. So we sent out a survey that many of you generously answered.
The new design has four navigation menu items after the homepage: new, Best Films, genre, and mood. These were our users’ most appreciated navigation paths, in that same order.
We added a filtering box on the left of all selections: it allows to narrow down any selection to what’s available on Netflix (in 23 countries) or Amazon Prime (USA for now), and offers sorting options as well.
There are many more small iterations and what I like to refer to as “quirky” features - I won’t bore you with all of them here, but I assure you the new design is very quirky.
We’re super excited about this new look, but also super grateful for the support that allowed us to get this far.
If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consider doing so to support agoodmovietowatch.com and introduce more amazing film and TV to your life:
A subscription to our premium newsletter is also the perfect gift for all the film nerds in your life:
And as usual if you have any feedback or request for new features, please feel free to comment on this e-mail or reach me directly at bilal@agoodmovietowatch.com.
Talk soon,
Bilal