Dylan has an interesting post on his blog today about the “keep it simple, stupid” concept and how his team is applying it to the new happysheep newsletter, which debuted in inboxes everywhere earlier today.

Now, I’ve always been a strong supporter of using text e-mail over HTML in my daily e-mails – despite the fact that more and more of the Internet population seem to disagree with me – but we’ve been sending very graphical HTML Gameplanet Store Newsletters for years and it’s very much a habit that, so far, we haven’t tried to break.

With that said, one of the things on our list for our new site is a newsletter renovation. I think that we should take a leaf out of happysheep’s book and simplify so that the newsletters are 1) easier to write; 2) easier to read; 3) hopefully less likely to be filtered as spam and 4) easier to prepare.

Another thing we need to redo is the structure of our actual mailing lists. At the moment, if you’ve bought a PC Game, you will receive PC Game e-mails. That’s more or less how you subscribe to the list. What I’d like to do is give site users more options so that they can manage what they do and don’t receive without manually asking us to subscribe them, and without having to purchase anything first.

I’d love to hear thoughts on this…

I missed a generic work-related call at home tonight because I was busy, well, working, and it got me thinking – when I’m busy doing something I find that it’s not particularly productive to be interrupted for something completely off-topic.

On that note, I am a huge advocate of using e-mail for almost all communication and reserving the phone for truly urgent matters. As an example, a suggestion for a new feature or a chase-up on the progress of something is an e-mail. Conversely “The web site is throwing database errors all over the place” is a phone call.

[accidental snip - to be rewritten shortly]

Yesterday afternoon we received a batch of HD DVD movies at clearance prices from suppliers so we’ve created a special “Clearance Sale” page with them all listed at the hot hot hot price of just $14.95.

Unfortunately for me I panicked when HD DVD was discontinued so I had already bought about half a dozen of the titles that are on special at a higher price. D’oh! I picked up two more titles from this shipment though which brings my library up to about 30 movies. So far I’ve watched two of them.

The titles are disappearing quickly but we still have lots of stock of some of the titles including 300 which is definitely a must-have.

It’s been some time since I last gave away any clues on the progress of Gameplanet Store’s New Site project… so I thought I’d write a quick summary of what’s been going on recently.

Firstly, this is taking a lot longer than we hoped! As developers we are probably fussier and more thoughtful than we need to be at times – as an example our new category and product pages have both been through at least two or three overhauls each since the originals were “almost done” a couple of months ago. I’m pleased to say however that it’s looking good and at the moment (today?) I’m really pleased with our category designs. They should prove to be more useful as we have added a few browsing options for most sections including the oft-requested “Best Sellers” section so you can see the top products from key categories.

We’ve also split up the Release Schedule into “New Releases” and “Coming Soon” which we think is a definite improvement.

Another thing that is keeping us very busy is back-end changes. I won’t go into detail here but our product database has been overhauled (for both speed and expandability reasons) and of course this has created the need to recreate many of the back-end tools that the entire team uses on a daily basis. There’s the obvious things like product management but also major site components like order processing (there’s another reason this has become more complex which I’ll explain at a later date) and certain areas of customer service. Recoding stuff that we already have isn’t the best task; but it has also allowed us to improve on some administrative pages which we haven’t touched in years so it will eventually be worth the effort.

We’re slowly getting there though and we’re still very excited and eager to get it launched and share our efforts with you. More news soon.

We’ve known for a long time with Gameplanet Store that our content needs to be the driving force behind people visiting on a regular basis, so we put a lot of work in to keep the site fresh with daily news, rotating features, frequently-updating top-sellers lists and so on. The content that really matters though is the product pages; because obviously it’s pretty hard to sell something if the potential buyer doesn’t quite know what it is.

We think we already invest more (wo)man hours into this area than any other online store in the country, and with our New Site coming soon we are renewing our focus on content and plan to take it to another level again.

The first step is our Music category. We’ve spent the last few days updating hundreds of music CDs so that they have more complete descriptions, images and, in many cases, track samples that you can listen to. At present we think that about half of our music catalog has great data, so although there’s a lot done there’s also a long way to go – but, if you watch carefully over the next couple of weeks, you will notice everything improving almost before your very eyes.

On a related note, we have been amused numerous times in the past to see employees in bricks-and-mortar gaming stores looking up GP Store whenever a customer makes an enquiry about the release date of an upcoming game. We’ve also noticed recently that our images – now that we’ve started watermarking them – appear to be quite popular with another major gaming store’s Web site. Apparently they haven’t noticed the watermark. I wouldn’t want to be the guy that has to redo all of those images once they realise.

We’re not quite sure whether it’s flattering or disappointing that other businesses – and even the customers of other businesses – find us to be such a useful resource. We guess we’re doing something right.