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All About Jazz's Year in Review: 2011

All About Jazz's Year in Review: 2011
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Dear AAJ Reader,

2011 proved to be a transformative year as we undertook several steps to completely rebuild All About Jazz and expand its focus. And the improvements and expansion will continue long into 2012. Please read on for the details...

Index

1. What A Year!

2. Tops In Content

3. What's Ahead

4. Let's Swap Links!

5. Support The Cause

1. What A Year!



We worked some serious magic this year restructuring our technology, making it more scalable and adaptable to support both All About Jazz and our coming soon website Jazz Near You. Improvements were steady and we plan to release more features and improvements before year's end.

Some of this year's highlights include new professional services like audio.allaboutjazz.com and our calendar feed reader which will result in more listening opportunities as well as a more robust calendar of events. A bottom up restructuring of the web site resulted in a snappy new look. Check out how we looked less than a year ago. That's night and day! AAJ has been optimized and employs more modern technologies to improve page speed and security.

We redid the sign up / sign in process, we improved private message handling, and we better engage you with improved comments handling, reader-initiated recommendations and social media plug-ins. We restructured the calendar, added a scrollable archive to all landing pages, made significant changes to the photo gallery which now supports a slideshow, and redesigned and optimized the musician profile pages.

2. Tops In Content

We delivered a variety of outstanding content this year ranging from insightful interviews and in-depth reviews to weekly download features such as Dave Liebman Week and Dutch Jazz Week. Speaking of free MP3 downloads, check out our Top 50 downloads for 2011. You can also view our top read CD reviews, our top recommended CD reviews, our top read articles and our top recommended articles.

3. What's Ahead

With ambitious projects such as audio.allaboutjazz.com and the calendar feed reader behind us, it's time to focus on improving how we manage articles, news, featured MP3s and other content. It's an in-house effort, but critical for us moving forward. We also plan to ramp up reader participation opportunities which will make All About Jazz more engaging and fun. But the big project in 2012 is JazzNearYou.com. We'll have more to share about our new website in future announcements, so stay tuned!

4. Let's Swap Links!

We're attempting to link to every musician, business and blog/website in jazz, and would very much appreciate a reciprocal link. To learn how you can link back to All About Jazz, please go here. You can also follow us on Twitter (@AllAboutJazz) and like us on Facebook.

5. Support The Cause

You can help fund our ongoing efforts to support jazz online by making a donation to AAJ today. Your support will directly fund our Open Jazz Project.



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