Design and Photography Highlights

Let the trumpets blast. It’s time for a little change-up.

For the last 9 months,we have been quietly planning, re-designing and writing code for the new and improved version of Cutcaster. (This is when you can picture our team huddled around the drawing board, burning the midnight oil and planning out the re-design).

The new site, which is still being tested, should launch by the first of next year. It will drastically improve the sites design, usability, search engine optimization, page load speed, sales conversions and overall visual appeal. The first version of Cutcaster allowed us to see how people used the site. What people liked.  What confused people. What didn’t work. Some of it made us proud and some of it was frustrating. From the start, we always asked for your feedback and now you will see how YOUR feedback shaped our redesign.

Why the change?

This was long overdue and has been carefully planned out. The Cutcaster site had become slow during high traffic times of the day, our database and code could have been written better and the color scheme, while different, was a distraction from the main ojective visitors had which was buying images.

We want to be proud of the product we provide and the time had come to rebuild and re-invent.

What to expect?

The design of Cutcaster will be more elegant, provide better consistancy, be simpler to use and focus entirely on our contributor’s content. From the start, we knew we needed three things to be working for us.

First, Speed. Search had to be lightning quick and return the most relevant results or buyers would go elsewhere.  The reorganization of our database and code will ensure that the search engine will return results immediately, cluster similar images and start to rank them.

Second, Quality. Cutcaster has some of the best quality available in any picture library online. We have a creative director and image review team that carefully checks all uploaded files and over the last year has removed over 300,000 files from our library that were dated, showed unlikely situations or felt “stockish.” Now we are getting closer to 600,000 fully reviewed files of just the best of the best.

Third, Price. Cutcaster has the best pricing in the industry. Contributors set their prices and buyers can pay what they want. Our market-priced images tend to range in price from $1 up to $20 for a high resolution file. Buyers are sure to find a great deal everytime they search Cutcaster.

Over the next month, we will continue to update you on the process and ask some of you to beta test the improved site to work out the kinks. 2011 is going to be a exciting year with the new changes and we are proud to be able to put out a product that shows all the hard work that was done in the background.

If you haven’t already, please join us at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace (yes, some people still use MySpace).