Grand Rapids Business Journal Web Relaunch

The old grbj.com
I don’t want to talk about the speed of sliding images, discuss location of social media icons or spend hours fighting with a WYSIWYG editor for a long, long time.

This past Monday my company relaunched the Grand Rapids Business Journal website. When I joined the Gemini Publications team in September, the relaunch was already underway, but there were plenty of placement and populating projects within the last six weeks of the project.

My role was limited to lending my eye and web building experience to final placement suggestions, and lending my fingers to tweaking lines of text and populating photo galleries. This meant I could turn work off at a reasonable hour and go to sleep at my normal time, unlike our super hero web development team who worked til all hours of the night for many, many nights.

From our marketing goals, most of my work on the new site starts now—post launch. The new site has new registration features to get readers accustom to, and a digital face lift means a shift in social media strategy. Our user experience is different, our hopes/expectations from users are different, and the amount of content we have available on a regular basis is different.

The big slab of meat on my work plate now is prompting long-time users to interact with our content differently, and inspiring new users to get on board. Some of our new content/features will speak for itself, but in other spaces it will take new language from us—and in my case, new language in 140 characters or less.

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