The Krop Blog: Krop NewsView all postings

Welcome to the all new Krop.com. We tried to make everything a little better, and some things- a lot better.

Job Hunters: The 'notes' weren't being used very often, so we ditched those. But you liked the stars, and you all wanted a "hide" option for companies that didn't interest you, so we added that. We also made the searching / browsing of jobs and employers a bit more friendly than it was before.

Job Posters / Companies: We cleaned up the shopping cart, and job posting work flow. But more importantly, better site = more high quality candidates. The Creative Database has become a much more viable option to compliment your job postings over the last iteration and the new site reflects that.

Portfolio users: These days Portfolio hosting is the fastest growing part of Krop, and the new Krop site gives us a platform to roll out updates and new styles faster than ever.

Everyone: What gets our office buzzing the most is our new page we're calling Pluck't. Thousands of images are uploaded to the Creative Database every day, Pluck't is a real-time collection of individual works that caught our staff's attention.

As always, we want to know what you think - Questions & Comments: - support@krop.com

Enjoy!

As the Creative Database has grown, so has the demand from users to access their web stats. We spent a great deal of time researching various options including building our own, and decided that Google Analytics was by far the best fit. It's free and incredibly sophisticated, yet simple enough to give you a quick glance at who's visiting your profile.

If you have a Creative Pro account, and would like to activate Google Analytics: Open an account on the Google Analytics website, and paste your unique tracking code into the analytics settings under the "account" tab in your account manager. It's a fresh feature, so please let us know if you have any questions.

We've added some fresh faces to the 'Featured profiles' section on The Creative Database Page, check it out.

See what we've been up to

You may have noticed that early this morning a couple new features quietly appeared on Krop. Two simple little tools that probably need no introduction - Featured Jobs, and Private Notes. We hope they help you sort things.

At the earliest stages of talking to a potential employer, much of the discussion is out of your hands. But even when the ball is in their court, you can always benefit from a short note or two. Being able to recall a couple names and dates is a subtle way to let people know that you're organized.

Earlier this week we quietly launched Krop 2. It's been a long time in the making, and we hope you like it! It's a major milestone for us in terms of getting everything under one roof on our new development platform. There are some fairly obvious updates to the site like better search, better billing, better login, blog, etc. but the cooler stuff will be rolling out this week as we complete live testing.

The best part about the launch is that our focus can now return to pushing upgrades to the Creative Pro accounts. Stay tuned, and keep the suggestions coming.

As we expected (and you can probably relate with) the two weeks immediately following releasing a new web application like the CDB are filled with a few surprises. Bug fixes, IE problems, questions that need answers, IE problems, etc.. We'd hoped to be showing off a few cool new features by now, but that wasn't in the cards.

The good news is that the roar of the bug report hotline has turned to a whisper, and we can now shift focus back to pushing new features, and launching Krop 2 - code name "Washington" (ok, i just made that up - although if you ever do call us and ask to discuss "the Washington project" we'll probably take you very seriously regardless).

Thousands of you have created profiles, and we can't believe the level of talent that is emerging. We are truly humbled that so many of you have allowed our application to host your work.

Here are a few favorites that we couldn't wait to share:

From left to right:

Buff Monster: Fine Art, Los Angeles
Evan Lane: Photographer, Los Angeles
Ruth Ishbel Munro: Illustrator, Brighton, UK

We've thrown together a quick introduction to the new app. Even with screenshots and sample accounts, some of our favorite featres took too much digging to find, so we thought we'd make our own informercial demo. Enjoy!

Allow me to introduce the Krop Creative Database! We're excited to be able to open the application up to the public today.

We are very proud to be launching our portfolio hosting platform that is completely advertisement free! Before we get into details - you'll notice we've split things into two accounts - The Basic, and the Pro:

The Basic Account: Free, with no ads - but a 10 image limit and lacks some cool features. If your permanent portfolio is hosted elsewhere, it's a great way to gain exposure within the creative database with a resume and a snapshot of some of your work.

The Creative Pro Account: $9.99 /mo (or $99/yr) Unrestricted image uploads, style switching, domain mapping, and a few more goodies. This account is the permanent home of your new portfolio.

We're excited to see what everyone thinks, so please let us know. We'll be back here with details on completed features as we roll them out over the next few days.

Thanks again for everyone that helped us beta test!

First, I want to thank everyone that's been trying the Beta! The response was a bit overwhelming, and within an hour or so we had to shut down the invites for fear of breaking the staging server.

You'll notice that many bugs effecting the public displays have been worked out, along with the horizontal scrolling, click-for-next, etc.

Soon to come: We are currently swapping graphic libraries for better image handling (uploading & cropping). And a bunch of quirky UI things have been brought to our attention that we'll be addressing in our next update as well.

Note: the sIFR (big flash text) was broken yesterday during an update, sorry if your profile looked weird for a few hours...

But that's why we call it Beta - cause when you call things beta, nothing really needs to work... right? ... like my beta six-pack-abs... or Jason's beta new years resolution to drink less.

A very short list of you have been invited to give us your thoughts on our new application - the Creative Database. Bug reports are welcomed, but what were more interested in your general impressions of application itself. Design, workflow, UI, etc. We can't thank you enough for your time, and your patience while we prepare for a more official beta release.

What to expect:

We're calling it a Beta, which is cheesy enough, but in reality, as I write this, you are looking at what would more accurately be described as Alpha software. We have a big list of bugs and known issues - Here are a few biggies:

• Performance, we have some scripts running to catch bugs, which are slowing all things down considerably.
• Documentation is currently non-existant.
• Internet Explorer currently doesn't work, but it is at the top of our list of things to address.

Thanks Again! QBN