Greater than 5 minutes, my friend!

Hi friends! I hope you all having a wonderful Summer!

We’ve been quite busy in the past couple of months (and in the past few weeks in particular), working really hard on making The Open Mic even better for you.

We hope you’ll enjoy this nice little roundup post with all recent features and improvements to our tiny platform.

Check out our brand new home page 😍

We love design! We love design that looks great and offers awesome functionality.

With our new home page it feels like we’re launching The Open Mic 2.0!

We made a lot of changes and improvements under the hood to make sure we place your content front and center.

Here are some major changes:

• Clear call to actions right on the home page, inviting site visitors to join the community (if they’re translators) or use our directory (if they’re clients);
• Filtering options that would allow you to choose what you want to read: Everything, Featured or Articles from People you follow;

• Articles are now displayed in a beautiful list with 3 columns and Title, Featured Image, Short Description, Category and Author Avatar and Name.
  A clear call to action button makes it super easier to open and read articles, while you can also click on author’s avatar and go to their profile and/or click on Category and go to category page to read similar articles.

• New site footer (!) – you can’t imagine how long we’ve been waiting to add it;

• New category pages with clear explanation of what a particular category is about. Check this out;
• New Contribute to the blog button on the home page and category pages to encourage people to contribute to our awesome blog;
• New and super good-looking author box under articles;

• The author box also displays social media icons that lead to author’s social media accounts so you could connect with them;
• View Profile or Send Message buttons allow you to send private messages or view profiles of our authors – very handy if you want to thank them privately or ask a question;
• New Related Posts section displays other interesting articles that you might want to read;

• Better mobile experience! We’re making The Open Mic mobile first by adding new fluid and responsive mobile menu, along with other improvement that make browsing from your phone a lot more enjoyable;

And, of course, we made tons of under the hood improvements to make your reading experience even more enjoyable. We really hope you’ll love the new look of The Open Mic!

New cover images on our social media accounts and new tagline 😃

Howdy friends! We’re doing some teeny-tiny re-branding across all of our social media account to better reflect who we are and what we do.

Here’s our new cover image:

And our new tagline: The Open Mic – Where translators share their stories and where clients find professional translators.

What’s the point of such re-branding, one might ask.

Well, we feel with our new and exciting direction that we’re taking with the launch of The Open Mic for Clients and our new design, we need to emphasize what is it that we do in order to make it easier for our awesome site visitors extract the most value from our platform.

We hope you’ll love our new tagline and cover images!

Check out our new user tours 💡

We love improving user experience, but you probably know that by now. 🙂

In our latest attempt to improve site’s interactivity we’ve created a few self-guided user tours and added them at various pages around our website.

These tours are super helpful and explain the basic functionality of our platform and how certain things work.

If it all sounds complicated, check out Simon’s profile to see what we mean (just make sure you open it in private browser tab. You’ll see a pop-up tour that explains how our profiles work. It’ll look something like this:

Pretty awesome, right? We have even more tours all around our website, so feel free to explore and find them all. 😃

New progress bar 📏

Wanna know how far you’re into the article? Well, our new progress bar does exactly that!

Now, when you’re reading an article on The Open Mic you’ll notice a thin blue progress bar below our menu that shows how much you’ve left to read.

Very handy for those awesome long form posts. And here’s a quick GIF that shows you how it looks:

Pretty cool, eh? 😍

New mobile menu 📱

We got a brand new mobile menu.

We know that at least 50% of our readers come from mobile and our menu has always been our weakest link.

Well, not anymore! Visit The Open Mic from your mobile device and enjoy our new, super fluid and responsive menu.

New minimalistic look for signup forms 📧

As you probably now, any blogger publishing on The Open Mic can connect their Mailchimp account and add a signup form to their articles.

After some pondering we decided to freshen up the looks of those forms. So… behold the magical transformation!

Before

After

Pretty magical, eh? 😍

New forms are super clean and minimalistic, yet they do grab your reader’s attention.

We really hope you’ll enjoy using them!

New Feature Requests page 💌

Love The Open Mic? 😍 Want to make it extra awesome? Suggest your features and let us know what you want us to build next!

Visit this page to add your feature requests or vote for existing suggestions!

You can also find this page in Menu > Need Help? > Feature Requests.

We use Canny to collect feedback and feature requests, so make sure to use one of your social media accounts when suggesting or voting on new features.

Spice up your Open Mic profile with social media feed 😎

Want to make your Open Mic profile extra special?

You can now embed a cool-looking social media feed to help your colleagues and clients connect with you on social and share your social media post directly in your Open Mic profile.

This new integration is powered by Juicer.

Check out this how-to video to learn more about it:

Some other minor tweaks and updates worth mentioning 👍

• New fields of expertise: Corporate Social Responsibility, Human Rights, Mental Health, Archaeology, Museums, Cosmetics Industry & Beauty;
• New associations: Houston Interpreters and Translators Association, Slovak Association of Translators and Interpreters, Israel Translators Association;
• We’ve added Product Reviews category (thank you, Pieter, for this suggestion);
• Another great milestone for The Open Mic is launching The Open Mic for Clients! Finding professional freelance translators has never been easier! Learn more about this exciting new direction in this blog post;
• We’ve added American sign language to the list of languages (thanks to the awesome suggestion from Ruann);
• We fixed a bug with our map – now you can add your latitude and longitude to add your profile to our awesome global map of translators and interpreters;

[clickToTweet tweet=”Wow! @OpenMicXL8 just got a major facelift and looks even better than before!” quote=”Wow! @OpenMicXL8 just got a major facelift and looks even better than before!”]

We hope you’ll enjoy those nice little improvements and changes.

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make The Open Mic even better for you, please, share them in comments or on our dedicated page for feature suggestions.