Blog

So that will do it for this week. We will probably be posting a few times next week, though we imagine a lot less than usual. Regardless, you'll definitely want to check in at the start of the year as sale season will have started in earnest and we will be listing all the great savings daily. We also have several designer interviews that we'll be publishing very soon that we're quite excited about.

Finally, as we close year two at Jargol.com, we'd like to thank your for your readership, your kind comments and your many great store suggestions. Have a happy holidays!

Update: Oops, as the comment kindly pointed out, we meant January 2007 of course.

We were excited to find out that we're in January 2006's issue of Lucky (pg. 117).

To the Lucky editors: Thanks for the shout-out and the most astute description of what we do around these parts.

To Lucky readers: Welcome! Our blog is updated 4-5 every weekdays and a few times on weekends with the latest sales, new arrivals from some great shops, profiles of up-and-coming labels and introductions to new shops around the world. Our shopping guide is an ever-expanding resource for some great indie shops. If you're near a big city like New York, LA or San Francisco you really should check out our interactive shopping maps and suggest your own favorite shopping spots. Come back soon!

Just wanted to put a notice out there that we're going to be in Chicago all next week. If you guys know of any stores we should visit now would be an opportune time to suggest them. If y'all know of any Chicago based designers we ought to be talking to, send those in as well. Thanks!

Just wanted to mention that we are going to start doing more and more profile posts about particular brands that we come across while searching for cool stores and such. The first profile will be Rogue's Gallery, above.

First of all, that's it for this week, we'll see you right back here next Wednesday. Have a good July 4th!

Secondly, here are some things we're planning for this here site in the weeks to come.

• We're going to be interviewing several different established and emerging designers.
• We're visiting San Francisco and will be doing a neighborhoood by neighborhood shopping guide.
• We'll be doing the same for LA.
• We'll be working on some features on online shopping from stores in Europe and other foreign locales.

Stay tuned!

So we're back and there's much to talk about. As you can see the site is markedly different. Besides overall look and feel differences, there are two major new features.

Tags

Tags are basically a 2006 way of saying keywords. They are words and combinations of words that describe blog entries and, more importantly, stores. Longtime visitors of the site will remember that we used to employ categories and sub-categories for this. But sub-categories were annoying to browse and limiting. By tagging stores and blog entries we effectively mix and re-mix our content into interestings collections. Here's a list of stores that carry authentically Japanese wares. Here's a list of stores that focus on products sourced from designers local to their area. We find this to be pretty useful when we're looking for specific types of stuff.

Maps

We've also spent much of the past month building our interactive shopping maps. There are basically two types of maps, both with their own uses.

City maps (pictured above) allow you to quickly and easily get a feel for the types of cool stores in a city. You can look at a city by neighborhood or by tag Here's New York and here's LA.

The second type of map is the "tag" map. These maps just take the list of tagged store we mentioned above and bring them to life. Tag maps allow you to browse, for example, all the women's clothing stores or all the sneaker stores or urban vinyl stores or what not.

Blogging/Articles/Stores

On the content side of things we'll be updating this here blog with interesting tidbits about fashion, design and shopping 2-4 times per day, every weekday. We're also planning on interviewing more designers for our "Features" area. And finally, we'll be continually adding to and maintaining our store guide.

But that's enough talking. Starting tommorrow, expect lots of doing.

If the site is looking a bit strange, press 'Refresh' once or twice. What you see in front of you is the first phase of our redesign. The look is a bit less Lilly Pulitzer and a bit more Comme des Garcons. Alongside the new look are a hundred and one small adjustments. Really. There are at least one hundred and one and probably more small improvements throughout the site that will hopefully make it easier to use and easier on the eyes. With that being said, the best is yet to come. In roughly 2-3 weeks, we'll introduce two more features which we're quite excited about. Until then though, except no updates to the blog or shopping guide. We have tons to talk about and dozens of new stores to add but we'll get to all that once this redesign is out of the way.

We maybe should have mentioned this a bit earlier, but things are going to be a bit slow around these parts while we work on some improvements to the site. Expect sporadic posting the next few weeks. Trust us, it'll be worth it!

And will begin posting shortly!