About KnowThis.com Site Redesign, Shift in Content Focus

Yesterday KnowThis.com introduced a new look.  Users will notice a major change to the layout of the front page and minor changes on inside pages.  The changes include:

• A simplified front page layout that highlights the key areas of:  Inside Categories, Tutorials and Marketing Stories. 
• On the front page the site search feature now takes center stage.  This move is certainly a bow to the Google-style of web design and one that many Internet users have become comfortable seeing.
• Site-wide changes have been made in color scheme, font size and top of page layout.  The most noticeable change here is the move away from yellow-colored menus to a basic white background.
• The listing of Marketing Stories for a Topic Area now shows the number of stories in our database for the Topic Area. (see example on this Advertising page)
• Numerous other minor upgrades and changes.

The new design was initiated after a careful evaluation that took into consideration input from site users and analysis of site traffic trends.  This evaluation not only affected site design, the process led us to re-focus KnowThis.com on those core things that we do best, namely, providing unbiased and highly detailed marketing information. 

As a result there have been  many changes in site features and overall direction as outlined below.

Enhanced Tutorial Development
By far the most valuable resources we offer are the detailed tutorials.  These receive thousands of visitors per day.  We have decided to direct our content development efforts to creating more tutorials.  We have also decided to place all tutorials within our highly detailed Principles of Marketing series.  Two tutorials, How to Write a Marketing Plan and Preparing a Market Study have been moved to the Principles area increasing the current number of Principles tutorials to 25.  Over the next few weeks the other tutorials will also be incorporated under the Principles series.

Move Away from Articles
The development of stand-alone marketing articles is suspended.  The content of many of the existing articles will be added to tutorials.  However, for the next few months these articles are still accessible when using the site search feature.

Creation of Site News & Blog
The area of the site formerly called Articles and Information is now renamed Site News & Blog.  Information here will mostly consist of reporting updates made to the site, including notification of our Weekly Marketing Stories list, and also occasional marketing-related postings will appear within a Thoughts/Comments area.

Finding More Marketing Stories
In regards to the Marketing Stories feature, this is also a very popular area and efforts will be made to increase the number of stories we add each week.  We are also going to add more stories from several leading publications that we previously did not use due to their tendency to restrict access after only a few days of initial publication.  These sources can now be added as more publications move away from a subscription model to an advertising-supported model.

Dropping Free Research Reports
The Free Research Reports section has been discontinued.  When this section was started a few years ago there were many readily available research reports that were quite easy to locate.  However, websites have become more protective of their material and locating research reports has become quite time consuming.

Increasing Weblinks
Our Weblinks Collection found within each Topic Area (see example on this Market Research page) containing links to highly selective websites remains and will soon be enhanced with the addition of many more sites.  In addition, we will continue to support the special Search Best Marketing Sites feature that allows users to search only the websites found in our Weblinks Collection.

Marketing Jobs
This new feature introduced a few weeks ago has been well received and will remain.

While overall the changes may seem to reduce the number of features offered on KnowThis.com, we believe it aims to achieve a goal that all marketers should seek – namely giving customers what they want.  By shifting our focus to building strong tutorials as well as beefing up our Marketing Stories and Weblinks we are hoping to continue to support our slogan of being “the knowledge source for marketing”.