One of the new front-end features I’m most excited about with our new site is the ability to browse categories by “brand”. What this basically means is that you will be able to filter a category down by some of its most prominent franchises or characters. As an example, if you were looking at the PlayStation 2 home page you might see the following brands:

• Buzz!
• SingStar
• Final Fantasy
• Need for Speed

I’ve named our top four PS2 brands by product count in this example, but there are loads more and I’m really quite excited about the potential that this feature has for our existing product ranges as well as the new ones that we plan to introduce when New Site goes live. In all honesty, gaming isn’t the best example, but hopefully you’ll share my enthusiasm once everything is done and you can see the results.

On the technical side of things, the brands concept is a shift from the way we’ve done this sort of thing previously. I won’t go into great detail, but with Gameplanet Store we have an enormous category tree which contains top level categories like DVDs, Games and Music and, below each of those, things like DVDs > TV Series or Games > PlayStation > Action. Then, if we wanted to make a special page for, say, “Final Fantasy Games”, we would add a new invisible category, add each item to the new category, and pull the results based on that criteria.

With New Site, we plan on consolidating the category tree so that it’s reserved for real categories (genres, if you prefer), and then building tricky pages by the use of branding as well as a couple of other new backend categorizing tools we’re developing. A comparison:

Gameplanet Store:

Category = DVDs > TV Series > Comedy > The Simpsons

New Site:

Category = DVDs > TV Series > Comedy
Brand = The Simpsons

Because the branding is not tied to the category, we will also be able to show you category-unspecific pages so that you can see The Simpsons Game, The Simpsons Movie and The Simpsons Sing the Blues all from the one section.

This may seem like a subtle change on the surface but it will give us back-end flexibility with our content management and, most importantly, it will give you more browsing options so that you can better find what you’re looking for.