Go check it out: The Tokyopop website has been redesigned with much, much better navigation. I just got off the phone with Tokyopop’s director of new product development Jeremy Ross, who directed my attention to the manga widget at the top of the page; you can expand it to full screen or embed it on your own page if you want to discuss a particular title. The navigation is different than before, but it’s pretty intuitive: There are drop-down menus with meaningful labels, and they managed to keep a lot of the social networking stuff while allowing the rest of us to just look up a catalog page. Take a look and feel free to post reactions here.
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[…] seemingly, less controversy, from manga fans than previous updates. (Hat tip to Brigid Alverson for notifying the community about the site relaunch.) That silence (or is it indifference?) piqued our interest, and so we […]
It’s better, but it’s moving so slowly for me. A page’ll load, but it takes a good ten seconds before I can scroll down.
I personally felt it was easier to look up titles on the older one. When I search for a manga, it will not take me to it now. The search feature in the older one worked like it was supposed to, but not this new one. And yes, the whole thing just takes too much time to load.
Also, it no longer has the volume list on the side of a title page in the shop. You don’t know how many volumes there are in a series until you go to mangaupdates.com.
I wish T-pop would just stick to what it does best: producing the books.
I haven’t really had much time to look at it, but they couldn’t do any worse than the old one. Once they started their “jargon” edition I never visited the site again. It was too hard to find anything. Like to find a title you would have to click on the “wham bang” key. Or if you wanted to order a book you would click on the “ouch” button. And then there were all kinds of “hot”, “whip”, and “smash” buttons. Of course, I’m being sarcastic, but every simple English word was reinvented on their website in a pathetic effort to be cool and cyberhip. Just from a quick glance it looks more friendly, or as the old site would have labeled it….socialequitabal.
No matter what kind of fancy drop-down menus they slap on that layout, it still doesn’t help with the organization issues, loading problems and needing to wade through endless streams of questionable user-submitted content. Everytime I hear ‘Tokyopop’ and ‘new layout’ in the same sentence, I get my hopes up but each time the page just greets people with something new slapped on top, instead of fixing what’s already there. Alas…
I think it’s better than before (ex site was really confused, but now i can find everyting i want).
From a creator standpoint:
The blog importation is still futzed. Most places allow for entry of your RSS url into their import program—T-Pop still requires some funky numerical code in your entry in order to validate, and it’s not working. :(
Also, unless you’re a T-Pop creator, there’s no real way to promote your bibliography there. Not unless you want to add samples of each of your titles into their ‘manga’ viewer, which I don’t quite feel comfortable doing. The term ‘portfolio’ is a real misnomer.
The manga reader works MUCH better for different screen sizes, however it’s still very slow loading, clunky, and missing the most important aspect- a strong focus on TP’s books. It’s no longer a horrid mess like the past few revamps, but it’s still disappointing/hard to navigate if you want information about TP’s publications.
I realize that T-pop is also doing a lot of work with media other than print material, but they should focus most of their website on the product pages rather than fuddy-duddy “clans”, “stars”, “pops”, and “Princess Ai”. Tell me, what does a company gain with a dozen youtube videos about Princess Ai?!
Del Rey’s product list and Viz’s categories make it easy to find every single title the company has (even ones you don’t know the name of). With T-pop, you gotta know the name of the title, otherwise you’re gonna have to scroll through endless lists.
If you’re tired of this new website, just visit your trusty comic shop because they usually stack things according to publisher. Plus, you can look INSIDE the books (and not a crappy “manga viewer”). Way better than T-pop.com for sure.