Migrating a web site is a little like moving a house. You have to pack everything up from the old place and find places for it in the new one. The sheer amount of stuff you’ve accumulated over the years is always astounding. The bigger the house, the more work it is. And Pool & Spa News is a very, very big house.
In case you missed the metaphor, PSN’s web site, poolspanews.com relaunched last week and now runs on a whole new architecture. Our sister publication, Aquatics International, will be making a similar move in the next few weeks.
Aside from the sheer labor involved, the migration of more than 15 years’ of content from one site to another is a gargantuan task. To go back to the house metaphor, we’re still moving in — still figuring out where exactly everything should go and where it will make the most sense. But we’ve unpacked enough to let you in to look around.
I encourage you to take a tour of PSN’s new home and let us know what you think. As you do, it will be helpful to understand why we’ve arranged the house as we have. One of the first things you’ll notice is that the navigation (the top menu) of the site has changed. Think of the nav (as they say in Web circles) as the site’s blueprint, or a map to the different rooms of the house. The new site is all about getting pool and spa professionals to the information they need quickly and logically. So we set the site up based on our core reader groups: Builders, Retailers and Service Techs.
We think the new pages are attractive and easy to use. But the real magic happens behind the scenes. It works like this: Let’s say you’re looking for an article about vanishing edge pools. You find it, but it’s not quite what you were looking for. On the old site, you’d have had to search again for “vanishing edge pools” articles and try to find what you’re looking for. The new site intelligently gathers up all the vanishing edge stories in one place. Not only that, it allows you to slice and dice our content based on key words within the article itself, such as glass tile, or even the byline of the author. Just click on one of those key words and — voila — articles appear based on that info.
Pretty cool!
As we continue upacking and getting comfortable in PSN’s new home, it’s only going to get better. But let’s be clear: This is your home. We want to hear from you what we can do to give it better flow, convenience and especially value. I hope you’ll use this space to share your thoughts. What else would you like to see? What could you do without? What would make your life easier? Ponder those questions and get back to me.
Meanwhile, welcome home!