New (much improved) Metal Academy Website in Development - maybe

The first thing to say is that I wrote a long, heartfelt message last night in the Site Suggestions forum. I included a couple of transparent images in that post which inadvertently shut the site down. It was completely inaccessible. How ironic it was that in the process of announcing that I've been working on making a new, less volatile website, that the website broke. My only way of getting the site back was deleting the previous Site Suggestions forum. Let's try again...

Interesting news Ben. Will this entail much change in features and how the site looks or  is it going to be more of an improvement in background processes?

For the past 3 or 4 months, I've been working on a new Metal Academy website. At first I was doing it just to see what I could do, but I found myself going back to it every day and spending hours playing around and building some ideas that I've had for a long time. It's got to a point where I can genuinely see a time where we might want to switch over to the new site, but I must admit that I'm very daunted by the idea of trying to move across all the content from this site (forum posts, reviews, releases, bands, cover images etc.) to the new one.

I feel like it's time to share some of the work I've done to date. More importantly though, I genuinely want to hear what people would change on Metal Academy, or what new features they would like to see. I encourage everyone to think of Metal Academy as a metal community site and not just a novel way to rate and review content. Let's think big and come up with crazy ideas that would make the site even more novel than it is. New features could be clan based, or they could have absolutely nothing to do with our novel clan approach.

Before you make suggestions, know that the new site allows you to filter and sort everything the way you want to, with no limitations. There have been lots of requests to improve the filtering on the current site, so know that whatever you want to do on that front will be possible on the new site, including AND / OR options (show me all releases that belong to The Fallen AND The North or show me all releases with Atmospheric Black Metal AND Depressive Black Metal subgenres).

OK, here are some images of what I'm working on. Obviously these are not necessarily the finished product. Also note that the new site contains dummy data, so don't pay any attention to the actual album information you're seeing.

Here's the current Homepage. I will continue to tinker with it, so this is the most likely page that could change dramatically before any potential go live. Still, it gives you an idea.

Here's the current Releases page in List view. There's also a Grid view.

And here's an individual Release page. I'm really happy with the way this is coming along. The clan based colouring works really well and the added features (Tracklisting, Track rating, ability to add the release to one of your lists, and a comprehensive recommendation section) are all working the way I'd hoped they would.

This does look very eye-catching Ben and I like the idea of increased flexibility on search options. I think tracklistings are also a must and have long hoped that they would be added as a function.

I am very much a lists person, so would it be possible to have a users lists linked on their profile page, similar to RYM, because how they are currently arranged, all being lumped together, feels a bit random. It would also be great to have clan-specific lists linked on the respective clan homepage.