Welcome to the new InfoWorld!
What you see on your screen is more than a new design. It's a new architecture through which we can properly present what we do best -- real-world advice, reviews, opinion, and advocacy for IT professionals. We've been hard at work on this site for over a year and we're thrilled to offer it to you at last. By "we," I mean InfoWorld's editorial staff, the developers and designers who did the hard work, and the extended family of IT experts and thought leaders who write for us.
What we've done, basically, is modernize -- which is also the new theme of this blog. Modernizing InfoWorld went deeper than look and feel. For us, the process began with a top-to-bottom look at what we do, followed by some serious soul-searching to determine where we wanted to go based on our resources and customers' needs. Next came a detailed plan of how to get there, starting with the collection of all requirements and ending with a technical blueprint. The rest was execution, but with continuous feedback to ensure we hit our objectives.
Expanding InfoWorld's surface area
Our first goal was to do a much better job of exposing InfoWorld's best content. To that end, we created six subject-specific Channels and 10 Topic Centers. All Channels and Topic Centers contain an Essentials section that serves as a mini research portal in which we highlight InfoWorld content of lasting value -- including InfoClipz, our three-minute animations that explain enterprise technology concepts, from SaaS (software as a service) to storage virtualization.
Each Channel has its own design, making it a "site of record" within the greater InfoWorld site, aggregating relevant news, feature articles, and reviews. The choice of Channels reflects InfoWorld's core strengths: virtualization, application development, security, cloud computing, enterprise mobile, and a Channel called Adventures in IT that aggregates some of our most entertaining material (hosted by the inimitable Robert X. Cringely) as well as career-oriented stories to create a "site of record" about the lives, joys, and crunch times of IT pros themselves.
All six Channels have a blogger host and a discussion area, so we can highlight InfoWorld writers who produce terrific material -- and provide new opportunity for our readers to join the discussion.
Topic Centers deliver similar value within the main design of the InfoWorld site. Design aside, the only functional difference between Channels and Topic Center is that some Topic Centers have blogger hosts and some do not. Like Channels, Topic Centers feature some of our greatest content and most popular bloggers: Ted Samson and his Sustainable IT blog, Randall C. Kennedy and his Enterprise Desktop blog, and a whole lot more.
