You’d be forgiven for not noticing the subtle changes around here recently, but believe it or not, things are a bit different! For starters, the entire site has been re-designed! From the homepage to the ticket listings and everything in between, we’ve given TicketStumbler a fresh coat of paint and covered up a few blemishes in the process; a snappier, more reliable, more usable experience awaits you! I’ve highlighted a few of the more user-centric changes below, but won’t be getting into the nitty-gritty technical details here today.

New Navigation

We’ve redone the navigation with an eye towards reducing the number of clicks between where you are and what you’re looking for. To that end, we’ve replaced the simple links with more useful drop-down boxes. The search box is the default and on most pages will already be open for you. The search box is special in that it offers more options than before (such as searching around your current location) and will add options as appropriate (like a checkbox to only search within a category you’re browsing).

No Account Necessary

We’ve gotten rid of the necessity to register an account to save your location. This allows you to search for local events more easily and receive location-relevant content without having to go through the hassle of creating Yet Another Account. If you had an account already, it still exists, but we are no longer doing the whole “Dashboard” thing — at least until such a time that we can offer a seriously compelling feature set which would require accounts to work properly.

Better Ticket Listings

All the code used to update, display, and filter ticket listings was thrown out and rewritten from scratch. In the previous version, if tickets were taking too long to load from our partner sites you simply wouldn’t receive any listings at all. This was not an ideal solution, but at the time it was the only one available to us. This time around, I wrote everything myself without relying on a giant framework, donning the Javascript hat I keep in my closet for emergencies. The result is pages which (a) load faster, (b) give you results even when some sites are down, and (c) provide a concise message if no tickets are available (instead of a blank canvas).

News Pages

If you’re looking for current events surrounding a team or artist during your ticket search, we’ve got you covered there, too. News pages are available for every category and give you the latest news, blog posts, tweets and more. Here’s the news page for the Red Sox.

Fin.

Those are a few of the highlights, but there are many big changes (hey, it took a couple months to complete, after all!) so I encourage you to look around. Let us know what you like, what’s worse, and what you still wish we’d do better. And look both ways before you cross the street. Unless you live in Boston, where all the roads are one-way. Here you need only rotate the once.