We interrupt your regularly scheduled BizSense reading to bring you this update. For those of you who maybe didn’t notice the difference, we relaunched the website this morning. And, boy, are my arms tired.
As always, there were unexpected delays and some frustrating flaws. But we’re up. Building a website is very much about building within the box. That’s how websites work – with boxes of information. And our new site has many of them.
So please join me for this narrative tour of our new site. First and foremost, the news is easier to find. Like the old site, you can search any term in the search bar. But you can also search by category. We still have the general tabs, Big Biz and Small Biz, but we’ve added more content-specific ones, such as commercial real estate and retail. We now have a People tab, which will house our weekly Q&As as well as news about people. We hope to fill them out with more reporting. We’re training a new reporter and will double the size of our editorial staff by the end of 2009.
We’ve also gone Hollywood and added video. We’ve hired a multimedia producer who will be filming a video each month that takes a video tour through local office space. This is part of our editorial offerings and is not an advertisement. We’re calling that series Office Sense. This month, the folks at marketing firm Play were nice enough to be our guinea pig. If you know of some cool office space, email [email protected].
We’re also expanding our non-news offerings in our push to become Richmond’s homepage for business. We’ve added a Google Calendar of business events. It’s free for any business to post. They need only email an alert to us, [email protected]. We are developing technology that will allow us to sell tickets for various business events around town, and for that service, we will take a small percentage of the sale. This is part of our push to expand beyond pure advertising-related revenue.
We’ve also clarified the Rich Wire. We think this is our best idea yet, but so far Richmond has been slower than we expected to jump on board. We’re not discouraged. For $100, any company can write its own story. To be sure, this is a departure from the old way of doing things. It used to be that a company sent a release to a reporter or out via a wire service (for which they paid a fee). Now we are doing all of that on our site. It’s a powerful tool for companies that want to reach out to our decision-making readership.
Web-based businesses cannot wait to perfect a product before launching. That’s why you always see “Beta” next to a product. Think of this as RBS Beta. There will be some glitches and some weird stuff. We will try our best to fix it.
We also want to hear your feedback. But please make sure to take a few days to get used to the new site before making us cry.
Aaron Kremer is the BizSense Editor. He has thick skin, so please share your thoughts by emailing [email protected].
We interrupt your regularly scheduled BizSense reading to bring you this update. For those of you who maybe didn’t notice the difference, we relaunched the website this morning. And, boy, are my arms tired.
As always, there were unexpected delays and some frustrating flaws. But we’re up. Building a website is very much about building within the box. That’s how websites work – with boxes of information. And our new site has many of them.
So please join me for this narrative tour of our new site. First and foremost, the news is easier to find. Like the old site, you can search any term in the search bar. But you can also search by category. We still have the general tabs, Big Biz and Small Biz, but we’ve added more content-specific ones, such as commercial real estate and retail. We now have a People tab, which will house our weekly Q&As as well as news about people. We hope to fill them out with more reporting. We’re training a new reporter and will double the size of our editorial staff by the end of 2009.
We’ve also gone Hollywood and added video. We’ve hired a multimedia producer who will be filming a video each month that takes a video tour through local office space. This is part of our editorial offerings and is not an advertisement. We’re calling that series Office Sense. This month, the folks at marketing firm Play were nice enough to be our guinea pig. If you know of some cool office space, email [email protected].
We’re also expanding our non-news offerings in our push to become Richmond’s homepage for business. We’ve added a Google Calendar of business events. It’s free for any business to post. They need only email an alert to us, [email protected]. We are developing technology that will allow us to sell tickets for various business events around town, and for that service, we will take a small percentage of the sale. This is part of our push to expand beyond pure advertising-related revenue.
We’ve also clarified the Rich Wire. We think this is our best idea yet, but so far Richmond has been slower than we expected to jump on board. We’re not discouraged. For $100, any company can write its own story. To be sure, this is a departure from the old way of doing things. It used to be that a company sent a release to a reporter or out via a wire service (for which they paid a fee). Now we are doing all of that on our site. It’s a powerful tool for companies that want to reach out to our decision-making readership.
Web-based businesses cannot wait to perfect a product before launching. That’s why you always see “Beta” next to a product. Think of this as RBS Beta. There will be some glitches and some weird stuff. We will try our best to fix it.
We also want to hear your feedback. But please make sure to take a few days to get used to the new site before making us cry.
Aaron Kremer is the BizSense Editor. He has thick skin, so please share your thoughts by emailing [email protected].
really like the new look!
really like the new look. it’s right on target!