This morning we deployed an improvement to the site that I'm really excited about. It's an enhancement to the Quick Search feature that returns results in a much more satisfying way. Previously, if you searched for, say, "Universal Pictures," the only search result would be the company's record, under the Company tab. As of this morning, the search feature returns results for each of the five primary search categories (OWAs, Specs, All Projects, People and Companies).
This adjustment is really cool, since it's the best way to see all of a given studio's open writing assignments. For example, that same "Universal Pictures" search now returns all of Universal's OWAs under the OWA tab; all of Universal's projects in the database show up under the All Projects tab; Universal's executives appear under the People tab; and the company's record shows up under the Company tab, along with any companies that have deals with Universal. (By the way, the overall deals list will be up to date by the end of next week - we'd been putting it off pending this and a couple other site enhancements we rolled out this month). In this example, there wouldn't be any results under the Specs tab since that category is restricted to scripts that have not yet been set up; if Universal bought a spec it would fall under the "All Projects" tab.
I noticed a couple of quirks in the search results this morning that we need to tweak (searching for an agency, for example, returns that agency's clients under the People tab, which I don't think is helpful), and we'll be weeding out these odd cases in the next development cycle. If you see anything that you think could be further refined, please email me at jscoggins at itsonthegrid dot com so we can add it to our list.
Speaking of our next development cycle, now that the above enhancement is done, the next major item on our list is an overhaul of our Advanced Search feature. We're aware that it's not as user friendly as it needs to be, and we're plannign to completely revamp the page to include date ranges (e.g., date logged, date last updated, etc.), people types (e.g., executives, writers, agents, etc.) and so on. If you have any suggestions for us in this area, we'd love to hear them, too. Our subscribers' feedback has been invaluable for our site development roadmap over the past few months.
Anyway, if you're a subscriber, give the new feature a whirl and let us know what you think. And if you're not a subscriber, sign up for your free three-day trial today and test it out. Now's the perfect time: Our prices are definitely bumping up by about 30% as of April 1, but if you sign up before then you lock in our current, introductory rates for as long as you stay a subscriber.
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