Welcome to The Vinyl Factory’s new website

Welcome to The Vinyl Factory’s new website.

A lot has changed since we launched The Vinyl Factory website in early 2013 and since four years in Internet time is a small eternity, we thought things were due a refresh.

So what’s new? One of the main challenges in designing the site was to reflect the breadth of The Vinyl Factory’s activities in a way that wasn’t always apparent with the old design.

At the top of the page you’ll see a master navigation allowing you to flip between the editorial site, the pressing plant, record label and Soho venue space. There you’ll find a brief history of the iconic factory we call home, hire info for the venue and, in due course, a totally revamped platform for the VF label.

Beneath this master navigation you’ll find a more familiar set-up, allowing you to explore the editorial content through News, Features, Films, Events and now Records. Currently this new tab will take you to our online shop, but we’ve got big plans for this section, which will be unveiled in the coming months.

Head to these sub-categories and you’ll also find a number of new tools to make navigation easier. In News, you’ll be able to browse via our Most Popular tags (whether that’s news about Sun Ra reissues or the new Technics SL-1200). In Features, you’ll be able to see our most important strands grouped more intuitively, allowing you, for example, to navigate all our record shopping city guides or turntable and tech pieces in the same place. Over in Films, our series, music videos and documentaries are now also more easily navigable.

And if you’re curious about what’s popular on the site, you’ll find substantial links to further reading beneath each post and in a new All Time Popular articles at the foot of the homepage.

Another challenge for this re-design was to find a more natural fit for the editorial content and the records we write about. Now, as well as related articles, all posts will carry a selection of recommended releases, picked by the editorial team from the Phonica and VF Editions catalogues. And in due course, all our releases will migrate from their home on VF Editions to be seamlessly integrated into this new design.

More than anything, we’ve attempted to make visiting the site as tactile and enjoyable an experience as possible. Perhaps most obviously, the site is much more visual, showing off the incredible photography and artwork so central to what we do. As well as the larger images you’ll see across the site, we now have the potential to present feature content as engrossing, interactive articles, with seamlessly embedded multi-media elements to help tell the bigger stories with the depth they deserve.

Inevitably, there will be small issues and bugs that arise, which we’ll be working to iron out over the coming days and weeks to make the experience of navigating the new site as smooth as possible for you, across all desktop and mobile platforms.

But as with all the best reissues, we’ve endeavoured to make this new iteration of The Vinyl Factory website an upgrade on the original. We’re very proud to present a website that can truly be called The Home of Vinyl on the Internet, and hope you’ll enjoy making it your home too.

Photo: Simon Brubaker at Logan Hardware, Chicago