I would imagine by this point even the least observant among you have noticed a few changes around here.
It’s been a long time in the making, and I can assure you that all of us here at the WHIR are excited to have the new design up and running. The interface is much improved on both ends, and we’ve got an assortment of new publishing powers at our fingertips.
We’ve given the redesign a bit of a soft launch, during what will most likely be down time for a lot of you. There will be a bit more of an official kick-off in the new year, but I wanted to post a kind of official acknowledgement of some of the changes taking place at theWHIR.com.
And I thought it might be helpful if I offered a few pointers that might help you get around the new site, and experience some of its functional improvements.
Your WHIR User Account
You’ll see a “login” link at the top of the page. This is where you can sign up for a WHIR account or sign in to or update your existing account. Your account will enable you to manage your newsletter and WHIR magazine subscriptions, receive certain special deals and offers, comment on WHIR news stories and blogs, submit your company to our database and add articles to our archive. It’ll also let you access several features of the new site I’m probably forgetting.
This is important: If you're an existing WHIR user, you'll have to request a password reset using this link, using the email address you currently use to access the WHIR, to receive a new username and gain access to your existing account.
Main Navigation and Tabs
On the main page, and on every content page, you’ll see a list of navigation tabs (Home, Web Hosting News, WHIR Blogs, etc.). They’re pretty self explanatory, but I’ll go ahead and explain them anyway. These are the major sections of our content. Regular readers will likely be familiar with all of the sections. In each tab, a horizontal yellow bar of links offers access to areas within that larger section.
One of the first things you’ll see in the “news” tab is a new news layout that enables us to feature what we consider to be the most important news stories of the day. The “web hosting news” tab is a great dashboard for accessing our most recent news, features and blogs. If you want an expanded look at the features or blogs, you can access those sections directly too.
You’ll also find a new “find news by date” tool, which makes it easier to browse through our archived content.
The news stories themselves are much the same, with a few useful additions. You’ll see at the bottom of each story a list of dynamically generated related content, as well as a list of some of our most popular recent content.
The WHIR blog section is much like it was. Like the news, it has seen a considerable aesthetic upgrade, and the addition of “related content” and “most popular” links.
Here you can browse our paid listings, read web hosting user guides and search our massive database of company profiles (by clicking “search by name”). You can also use this section to submit your articles to our knowledge base and your company to our directory. The Article Central section (which can be accessed through the “articles” link in the Find Web Hosting tab) makes it possible for users to submit their own articles, either in full or as a story lead.
Here, you can browse our paid listings for reseller services, as well as access our reseller guides, and submit requests for quotes on hosting services.
Like its previous incarnation, our new magazine section lets you order back issues, and access the online editions of any issue of WHIR magazine. However, the updated section makes it easier to subscribe, and includes more of the content from each issue, as well as direct links to online content from the issue.
The WHIR tv section of the site has seen some of the most exciting enhancements. However I’m going to let Anastasia address those more thoroughly in a separate blog post that will go up a little later this afternoon (look! here it is!).
Also
I think that ought to do for an introduction. As you can hopefully imagine, we’re still on the hunt for bugs, and I’d be more than happy to hear of anything you notice that doesn’t seem to be working quite right. You can use the comments section of this blog. Or you can use our contact form, since we won’t necessarily see comments right away (or possibly not at all, if they’re posted weeks or months after the blog post goes up).
I suppose I’ll take this opportunity to point out that while I’ve certainly invited criticism with this post, I’d also love to hear anything positive you might have to say. So if you love the new site, please consider your opinion worthy of the comments section.
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