The "devil is in the details" certainly holds true for ChemicalProcessing.com. Making sure that articles, product writeups, news items, videos, podcasts, webinars and the like appear properly to viewers isn't a task that involves the mere wave of a wand. A lot of work takes place behind the scenes. Trust me when I say our IT department and programmers are always paddling furiously below the surface to get the details right.
[pullquote]The folks on the editorial side of ChemicalProcessing.com are also concerned with the details and are always looking for ways to improve the user experience. We take into account comments from our visitors regarding font styles, background colors and registration issues to name a few. We also rely on our own experiences with navigation, logical placement and tools to help us get visitors to where they want to go faster and easier.
Our fine-tuning has led to several improvements on the site – and a few that soon will appear. For instance, we've just enhanced the format for our article URLs. Previously, these were fairly generic. They ended in numbers and didn't give any indication of the content of the stories they related to. For 2011 articles (and beyond), the URL will include the keywords from the article headline. This will help users better choose what links to click. It's also aimed at helping search engines pick up our award-winning content to ensure our expertise is widely available to every chemical processing professional.
In the near future we will roll out an improved white paper search tool; it will only highlight items within the white paper library, not everything on the site. This tweak resulted from our own frustration with trying to quickly find topics within the library.
We will also tweak our homepage to provide a better user experience. Our site contains so many important resources that we sometimes get carried away with showcasing them all at once. The result: sensory overload. In the future you will see our Vital Resources area revamped to present only one at a time via a nifty scrolling mechanism.
We also plan better presentations for our multimedia offerings. You are now able to access all of Rosenzweig's Ramblings videos in chronological order. See what is on Editor-in-Chief Mark Rosenzweig's mind — and behold his vast collection of ties and jackets as well as set changes. (At this point, we don't intend to put in subtitles for those not attuned to his New Yawk accent.) Look for Rosnezweig's Ramblings under the Multimedia tab – it is nestled among the Podcast library, Special Reports, Vendor Videos and Webinars, which features upcoming CP events and on-demand programs that can be viewed at any time.
Traci Purdum is Chemical Processing's senior digital editor -- and wish-list writer forwww.chemicalprocessing.com. You can e-mail her at[email protected].