Cosmetic surgery seems all the rage these days. I must confess I just don’t get it. To me, there’s nothing more beautiful than being natural.
When it comes to Web sites, however, I think an occasional facelift is necessary, and that’s exactly what we’ve done recently to www.bodyshopbusiness.com.
When we relaunched the Web site a little over a year ago, it was a vast improvement over the previous site. The primary goal was to create an additional source for collision repair industry information that complemented our print product. The goal behind that, of course, was to serve you, our readers, better.
So we’ve had one year to analyze what works and what doesn’t work on the Web site, and boy have we learned some things. I guess the first thing I learned is that no one reads my blog. Really! I take no offense to this; I’m sure there’s some logical reason why it gets little traffic. But I will continue to blog regularly and hope that more of you will post comments.
I’ll tell you what you guys do read: breaking news. As a result, we’ve increased the number of headlines on the homepage from three to five. We’ve also added a “Most Popular News” section so you can more easily see what’s being read the most, and a “Legislative News” section that aggregates any news of that nature. Being able to track exactly how many of you read this article or that article has really offered us a window into what information you want, and so we hope to deliver more of that in the future.
The “Custom Showcase” that features out-of-sight paint jobs and modified rides is still on the homepage, but it also hasn’t taken off with you. So expect that to disappear soon and be replaced by an “Ask the Expert” feature where you can submit a question on any business- or technical-related topic and get an answer lickity split.
We’ve also added a featured product from BodyShop Product Extra in the lower right corner of the homepage that changes every time you revisit the site. We know you like checking out products and equipment that can increase your profitability and efficiency and allow you to perform better repairs, so we know featuring a product on our homepage will be well-received.
Geez, am I forgetting something? Oh yeah, perhaps the single most notable change of them all: the color scheme! We wanted to make www.bodyshopbusiness.com more pleasing and easy on the eyes (there’s that facelift thing again), so we reduced the number of colors we were using and created a primarily white background. We hope you agree that the new color scheme is more aesthetically pleasing.
Change, as they say, is inevitable and necessary, and that goes for all the properties BodyShop Business delivers. If you look at BSB when it first debuted in 1982 and compare it today, well…there is no comparison. You might not believe the two versions are related, except for the masthead which hasn’t changed a bit.
And so it goes with the Web site, too. It’s a constantly evolving thing, and much more immediately changeable than the magazine. The reason we’re constantly tinkering with it is because we’re constantly evaluating how well it’s serving you, the reader.
If you have any suggestions about how we can make our Web site, the magazine or our e-newsletter better, please contact me. The only way to know if we’re doing our job well is to hear feedback from you. Let me know what you think about our “cosmetically altered” Web site!
Jason Stahl, Editor
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