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New AND Improved

By Bill Schober, Editorial Director

About five years ago, I wrote some editorials expressing delight over the launch of our site, www.instoremarketer.org. At that time, I must admit, I would have been delighted to have a website that did nothing but warehouse our thousands of industry display photos. That alone would absolve me of the duty to crawl through our dusty office basement in search of prints and transparencies (remember those?) for marketers who called for design ideas.

In fact, from Day One our site offered infinitely more than that since we cover an exceptionally horizontal waterfront ranging from Wal-Mart, Macy's and bicycle shops to applesauce, appletinis and iPhones. We served up research, tutorials, success stories, lectures, regulations -- you name it. Plus thousands and thousands and thousands of pictures.

But also from Day One, the dozens of other folks who made the site work knew that we would have to live with certain technical limitations. I called it the Iceberg Syndrome. The site's original coding unavoidably straight-jacketed the layout of our home pages, which in turn made them look quiescent. Some people had the impression that our content was static. In fact, our teams were adding lots of items to the site every single day. If you were adept at searching, you could find all the good, new stuff that, like an iceberg, was mostly buried below the water line. But more casual visitors might come away with the impression that not much was new from day to day.

Well, it's a whole new ballgame now. In fact, if you haven't logged on to www.instoremarketer.org since the team lead by Pete Breen & Rob Mahoney & Jack Dare relaunched it on Jan. 6, put this "analog" magazine down and do so. Right now. I'll wait ...

...welcome back. You probably noticed right away that the home page is more open in terms of white space, yet it has more sections and item starts. Snapshot it every day, Monday through Friday, and you'll notice that it continually realigns with new content. I recommend making a visit to the home page a daily habit. I have it bookmarked between The Drudge Report and PerezHilton.com on my browser.

Next, look at the top of the home page where you'll see the words "Retail Channel Pages."

Each channel that's listed is clickable and will take you to specialized "landing pages." So, for example, if your brands live and die in convenience stores, I'd bookmark that c-store landing page up in my browser's toolbar as well.

As you wander through the site, you'll notice that most areas, such as the content within the Retailer Handbook, is better connected with content from other areas of the site. Likewise, you can access the newest images (and we now have an astounding 27,000 of them) from nearly anywhere on the site. And our Article Search format is a bit easier to get your arms around. Try it.

While you're at it, try this: Go to the image vault, enter a search term like "school bus," and click on any of the images. In the image window that comes up, you'll notice a < Prev Next > at the lower left. Easy navigation. No more back and forth.

Got newbies on staff? Point them to the new content area called "Marketing Toolbox," where they'll find a wealth of tutorials, articles and graphics on industry trends, tactical options and best practices. Or do you want trends charts? Good Lord, we have a lot of them. I'll only mention here that we've added a "Recent Additions" area to the top of the "Research Library" page.

These are just a few simple ideas. I could go on and on, but the truth is, the Internet is all about customizing content to your needs. Please visit the site and do some strategic bookmarking of your own.

Published: February 2008

Source: In-Store Marketing Institute/P-O-P Times

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