Piano Chord Tools Update March 2010

Hello, Internet!

I've been a busy bee the last month updating two of my piano chord websites, List-of-Chords.com and pianochordfinder.org.

Changes to List-of-Chords.com

Instead of just the 72 pages that have chord charts, I've expanded the number of charts available to 544 -- similar to my other sites. I also updated the main flash diagram for each chord so that the piano looks more authentic, so that there's an 'octave jump' button that allows you to move more than one note at a time, and a draggable piano (left and right) so that I can use a larger piano in a smaller space.

there are other updates, such as the navigation takes up less real estate, so that the page is less cluttered. I have all 544 piano chords in a small box where the links expand sections of the list.

I decided to keep the old versions of the pages available with a link to the "CLASSIC" version of the page, mostly because I had a section that would actually show you the notes in the chord on the musical staff. I'd like to update and expand that functionality in the future.

Probably the biggest change is the increased prominence of google ads on my page. In the last 10 days or so since I changed the layout of my pages, and added more pages, my click-through rate has increased significantly. And while, I mostly use this site to promote my piano chord e-books, I have found that google's adsense program has improved significantly in the later part of 2009 when they stopped showing ads just about the page content and started showing ads based on the interests of the YOU the site user. This is great news for someone like me, because certain adsense terms such as 'mesothelioma' are worth a lot of money per click, while 'piano chords' is basically worthless on a per click basis. So, now if someone is interested in both 'piano chords' and 'mesothelioma' google will show them 'mesothelioma' ads on my piano chords website. This is a great change for people who spend countless hours creating free content on the internet in hopes of a little ad revenue!

Changes to PianoChordFinder.org

At one point this was my major source of traffic and I put a lot of time into it, so it was nice to go back now with new skills and experience and fix this site up. Similar to List-of-Chords.com, I made the ads more prominent. I also took the risk of linking to my competitors. So far this has backfired, because google has moved a couple of them up above 'pianochordfinder.org' in the results page for 'piano chords', but I feel in the long run, linking to the most interesting content on piano chords will make the site better, which fulfills my dual goals of providing a resource and promoting my piano chord e-books.

Mostly the content on the site hasn't changed although I did add one flash music game called 'Rhythm Blaster', which sort of an 'asteroids' style video game where you are shooting musical notes that break up into smaller rhythmic symbols when you shoot them. It was fun to create and hopefully will give someone who is new to music a fun way to familiarize themselves with musical rhythm.

Over the next year, I hope to add more tools. For example, I'm excited about creating a chord transposer tool, where people can transpose songs on the internet.