Have you ever watched one of those home-improvement shows in which a homeowner carries out some basic, weekend-warrior-type spruce-up projects to make a home more visually appealing? How about Extreme Makeover: Home Edition when the construction crew takes a wrecking ball to the existing place and starts from scratch based on the specific needs and wants of the home’s occupants?
We at Cabling Installation & Maintenance recently went through an experience analogous to one of those two television shows—not related to the office building we occupy, but rather, to the Web site we display to the world. If you have visited the site anytime since the beginning of October, I hope you’ll agree with me that the change was along the lines of a project in which Ty Pennington spends most of his time screaming into a bullhorn. Yes, to use the overused phrase, our Web site has gotten an extreme makeover.
As with all our efforts, the purpose of designing and populating our new site has been to do our best to serve your information needs. We appreciate and respect how valuable your time is, and developed a site that allows you to efficiently find information you’re looking for. The site organizes information—articles, news stories, new-product releases, and other material—according to topics in an architecture we call topic centers. Cablinginstall.com has eight such topic centers. When you arrive at our home page, you can choose any topic center and view a wide assortment of feature articles, news, product, and technology coverage related to it.
Those who have watched the Extreme Makeover show remember that in the first part of the program, key members of the design and construction team meet with the home’s occupants and plan the living space accordingly. We carried out our version of that process, asking site users what they did and did not like about our old site, as well as what they wanted more and less of in a site that they use to help them do their jobs. Perhaps I should be saying “you” instead of “they,” because many of you may recall taking part in conversations and surveys on the subject.
The cablinginstall.com Web site is produced and managed by those of us who also work on the monthly magazine. But we realize the site is only effective inasmuch as it is a useful tool for you. If you have not visited the new site, please do. Once you have gotten a good look, let us know what you think. Ty and his crew might pack up and move on to the next state after seven days, but we plan to be your information-provider for the long term.
PATRICK McLAUGHLIN
Chief Editor
[email protected]