Haystack is off to a great start. We launched two weeks ago on October 21st, and so far over over 2,500 web designers have been listed. Lots are finding clients as well. That’s exciting.

We’ve been hard at work improving Haystack. Here are some of the improvements we’ve made since launch:

Call to action footer

At the bottom of each company page, we’ve added a call to action after their portfolio shots. This way it’s easier to scroll through someone’s work and then get in touch with them. It says “Like what you see? Contact via email or web.” Here’s what it looks like:

Updated and New flags

We wanted to call out new listings and listings that were recently updated. So for the first 48 hours, a listing card gets a “NEW” badge. Any listings with updated descriptions or new portfolio images get an “UPDATED” badge. Here’s what they look like close up and also in context.

Cities and countries page

Our original solution for displaying cities other than the original top 15 cities we set up wasn’t very good. It was terrible, actually. So we’ve been working on a way to expose more cities and countries and make it easier to browse these locations. We’ve gone through a variety of iterations, and we’re pretty happy with our latest solution.

The US is broken out into states. States with only a few listings are just shown as states. States with more than a few listings, and multiple cities, are broken out by city. You can either view listings by cities, or see an entire state at once. Here’s Illinois:

Other countries with lots of cities and listings are also grouped by city, but smaller countries with only a couple major cities are shown by country. Here’s Denmark:

Success stories

As the success stories start rolling in we wanted to list them all in one place. We’re most proud of this page since it means Haystack is working. Here’s what the success page looks like:

We’ll keep improving

We’ve got some other stuff planned which we’re working on now. We’re also working on building traffic and increasing visibility.

Next week we’ll share some of the most interesting listings and some really creative ways to “hack” the portfolio images and logo images spaces we offer.

Until then, thanks again! If you’re a web designer, get listed on Haystack. And if you’re looking to hire a web designer be sure to browse the listings on Haystack.