SoKy Local Business or "SoKybiz"

UPDATE Monday 15 Aug, 2005 7:22 am: My opinion on this has changed, I feel they have made some key mistakes both in functionality and in structure. I will publish my critical review soon.

Well, the new site is up and I'm feeling a little guilty for going off on this rant. First, let me justify myself a little bit by expressing my opinion that the local newspaper is a VALUABLE source of current information as it relates to business and marketing. (But you knew that.) Since my work and my interests are online, that is where I get my information. I've noticed many technical, editorial and interface issues with our local newspaper's website, and even written about some of them, but in all fairness think they have done a good job.

That said; let me just say that the new and improved bgdailynews.com website is much better than it was before. Oh I have my rants, but for the most part the new site is a great improvement. I posted a picture of the old site, well here's the new one!

Screen shot of the BGDailyNews.com Saturday 23 Jul, 2005 12:26 pm

Great start guys and gals. Thanks!

I did send a link to my recent blog post to the new webmaster in the hopes that he would comment or at least reply privately... he did not. Maybe he's just too busy or getting so much spam he missed it. (Well it happens) I'm sure he and the service company are busily addressing the glitches.

Now to address my predictions. I made a few observations and hopes for the new site publicly and I have to gloat about at least one. 5 Years ago, I took a major job to revamp a large static website. There were about 1200 pages written by many people in different software. I changed the whole site from HTM to ASP (Active Server Pages). I knew that would mean that every link that was made to the site (either from inside the site or from other sites) would be broken because of the extension (asp) change. Simply put, none of the pages that were there before would exist. I built in redirects, bookmark change pages and automatic scripts that would help people (and search engines) rediscover the new pages. It's important.

Well, I predicted in an earlier blog that when the new Daily News site came out, that all the links to the old stories would be broken. Unfortunately I was correct. Even on this blog, the links are now broken. I know I'm not going to change my links and suspect few people will. What worse, Google and other search engines periodically crawl and index the website, storing the address of each story in their own database. For the next 6 to 12 weeks, most search results are going to offer broken links to the daily news website.

There were a couple of others but I'm not going to rant on and on. As a matter of fact, this whole process has me feeling a little guilty, well more than a little, enough to create another "personal" blog for rants such as this. This is for business, not a place to roast the daily news.

Business focus

Lesson one: The newspaper is a valuable resource for current information that affects your business. It offers insight into your competitions marketing focus and public communications. The local paper for a small business in a small community such as ours is priceless.

Lesson two: When making big changes to your business, think ahead. My rant about broken links is just an example. But in perspective, if you're going to move your business, you sure would let people know before, during and after how to find you right? If your staff changes, your going to help people find your new staff right? That is really the same things when upgrading a site like the Daily News. Help the customer find the information they are looking for... it's a matter of pride and professionalism in my opinion.

Lesson three: David writes too much, skim his articles because he sure gets wordy. (grin)

Carrie and I are off to New Orleans for three nights. Then Cozumel after that so I might not be around for a while. Take care and keep on keeping on.

This was posted by SoKy : 12:06 PM