It seems listening to our customers has paid some dividends.  As you know, earlier this week we launched a newly redesigned Website along with some feature enhancements (blog post | news release), and those enhancements were the result of customer input.

So far the feedback on the new look, feel and features has been solid.  Here’s as sample of the buzz leading up to — and after the launch:

• “PRWeb will reveal a better look and feel of their online identity, including the site design and a refresh of their logo, the new one being bolder and more modern looking…But the design changes are less important than the new features that will be added starting July.” – Everything PR
• “As part of the changes, the news center section of the online press release newswire will be overhauled to include a greater focus on SEO, which Vocus said will mean greater visibility and increased traffic for customers.” – PRWeek
• “With over 500,000 pages, implementing SEO friendly design and architecture changes to a site like PRWeb is no small feat. Structuring the news center according to industry categories creates more of a news destination vs. a repository of press releases. Better design and content organization provides a better user experience and will attract more links.” TopRank Online Marketing (Disclosure:  TopRank is both a customer and consultant to PRWeb).
• “Of course, the number of news release pick ups and the volume of traffic to sites will continue to be the criteria of success for users. It’s too early to tell how effective these changes will be, but they seem to be promising. I’m looking forward to trying the re-engineered PRWeb site with my next release, and see if I notice an uptick in responses.” The Art of Telling Your Agency’s Story

We’d also invite you to check out some of the comments on the post on the day we launched the new PRWeb Website. And to wrap things up – here are a few comments we found on Twitter:

So far, so good: Redesigned of PRWeb well received was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

This past Friday at midnight, we rolled out a brand new PRWeb.com.  This launch was the result of countless hours of effort logged by a wide variety of individuals – from developers, to designers, to writers and more, this was truly a collaborative effort that spanned the company.

Also worth noting is that the launch is a mashup of several different projects that have been on our roadmap for a while now.  Some changes will be immediately obvious, such as the updated look and feel of the site and the new press release template.  Other changes on the other hand, will reveal their impact over time – but more on this in a bit.  What is common throughout all the updates is our intention to better serve our customers – from providing them with more tools to get started to ensuring that the releases perform more effectively online, this launch was all about continuing to offer industry leading visibility to our customers.

As with all significant changes, there are sure to be questions that arise.  We want to take this opportunity to address some of the more significant changes you may notice with the new PRWeb.com:

1. We are no longer listing all $140+ releases on the home page

Back when PRWeb was a free service and publishing a far more limited volume of releases, front page placement was a benefit granted to certain customers willing to make a financial contribution to the company.  At this time there were more tangible benefits to front page placement in terms of readership and SEO.  Over time, the volume of releases published daily has swelled to a much larger number and we have ended up with a home page that can contain too many articles at times.  This has made the home page less than optimal for both users as well as search engines.

Our solution to this challenge has been to evolve from an architecture that focuses on one front page to one that has multiple front pages (from a search perspective). Tactically, we have done this by creating a section of our domain completely devoted to customer news releases, organized around industry verticals (i.e. arts & entertainment, technology, etc.).  This technique is one that is used by many sites with a large volume of content and is a generally accepted method for creating value in certain silos within the hierarchy of a Web site and passing value to the pages located within these silos (customer news releases).

As a result, we fully expect this new architecture to increase the volume of traffic to your release as well as your site.

2. We have made some major changes to the news release template

The PRWeb news release has undergone some significant changes.

First, you’ll notice that there is far more room being given to multimedia elements like video, images, and file attachments.  In the last several years we have gained a lot of empirical knowledge about the way that people consume news online.  Our own research into the effects of multimedia on news consumption showed that the presence of relevant images and video increased the average time users spent on news releases.  There is also notable research that has proven the correlation between multimedia and action.

Then again, all it takes is a quick look at the home page of CNN.com to see how multimedia is beginning to dominate the visual real estate of news sites today.

The second major change we have made is to place links to various actions such as sharing, further inline with the news content.  These days, news releases are not just about getting people to read a story; they are also about getting the reader to take some form of measurable action: to share on Facebook, e-mail to friends, and more.  Subsequently, we have optimized the placement of these links to make our news more action-able.

The final change we’ve made to the release is behind the scenes.  After years of adding code, the time had come for us to step back and optimize the code behind the release to make sure it was optimized for faster load times and better performance in search.  Speed is not only important for users, but leading certain search engines have been very vocal about the growing importance of speed when it comes to performance in search.

3.  We have introduced a dedicated learning center

Over the past few years, we have been consistently investing more time and resources into customer education.  We realize that although there are some folks who have been sending out press releases for years, the practice of creating and distributing online news releases is still relatively new.

What’s more, the varying backgrounds of our customers has created a need for a range of different types of content.  We have PR folks who want to learn more about SEO, and SEO folks who want to learn more about PR.  We have small business owners who want to move from sending out one release each year, to a more ongoing cycle of communication that results in the long term development of online visibility for their brand and their business.

So in response to the ongoing demand for educational resources, we are launching a dedicated learning center that will serve as a hub for all the various articles, webinars, and white papers we have put together.

Hopefully these points address some of the more glaring questions you might have.  If you have others (and I’m sure some of you will), please post them to the comments section of this article and we will make sure to address them as quickly as possible.

We’re looking forward to the conversation.

Introducing the New PRWeb Web site was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Over the past few weeks we have been previewing some of the enhancements we’ve been working on including the updated news release template and the brand new site for customer news releases. Today we’ll be providing a sneak preview of the rest of the site that will be rolling out in the next month or so.

Here are a few glimpses of what to expect:

Updated look and feel
For the past ten years, we have kept the look and feel of PRWeb.com relatively consistent so one of the first things you’ll notice about the new site will be a completely redesigned look and feel. We’ve made an effort to enhance the visual experience of the site, focus on content that users need and make it easier to navigate.

The new look and feel of PRWeb.com

More educational resources
Over the past several years we have significantly increased the volume of educational materials we provide to users. In addition to our educational webinar series, we have started to publish more videos, articles and whitepapers oriented around helping our users plan and execute top-notch online marketing programs with PRWeb. The new site will feature a learning center where all of our educational materials will be easily and freely accessible.

A sneak preview of the new PRWeb learning center

More customer examples
The size of our user base continues to grow rapidly into a broadening range of verticals. On a daily basis we see news releases from law firms, travel agencies, car dealerships, contractors and much more. In response to the needs of this growing diversity of users, we are placing more focus on providing more resources organized around different industry verticals. On a side note, if you have a compelling case study you’d like to share with the PRWeb community, please contact us by sending a Tweet to @PRWeb.

Customer examples by vertical

Placement of News
As mentioned a couple of weeks back in our preview of the news center, to accommodate the growing number of releases that are distributed over PRWeb daily we’ve created a new section of the site entirely devoted to customer content. Working in collaboration with some top SEO professionals and Web architects, we’ve built a news site that will be focused on providing top-line visibility for customer news releases. This also means that you won’t see as many stories on the home page of PRWeb but rest assured, by being hosted in a dedicated section of our site you should expect to see better placement in search and more traffic to your news releases than before.

A Sneak Preview of the New PRWeb Site was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

When PRWeb was still a fledgling start-up operating on a freemium model, we decided to offer placement on the PRWeb.com home page as an enticement to upgrade the value of a release. At this point in time, there was a far smaller volume of news releases being published each day and front page placement offered some tangible benefits to customers. For one, visitors to PRWeb.com looking to consume content were more likely to see the release if it was on the front page. Secondly, we believed that placing the release on the home page meant that the crawlers would get to it faster, increasing the rate at which the release would be indexed in search. So for one day, the customer’s news release would be hosted on the front page and subsequently relegated to deeper pages within the site.

Over time, the volume of news releases published through PRWeb has grown dramatically and the front-page approach has grown problematic from both a news consumer perspective (who wants to scroll through over a hundred news releases on a page) and from a search crawler perspective. The time has come to implement a site architecture that is more suited to the flow of content that is passes through PRWeb on a daily basis.

In re-architecting the section of the site devoted to customer news releases, we were driven by the following goals:

• To ensure optimal visibility for customer news releases – We believe that the primary benefit we provide to our customers is the visibility we are able to generate for them through their news releases. The majority of traffic that comes to PRWeb news releases is from search engines and we made sure to design a site architecture that would first and foremost, be focused on ensuring our customer news releases be easily found and indexed by search engines.
• To provide an optimal experience for news consumers – A secondary focus of ours was improving the general user experience for news consumers, which in turn translates to increased traffic for customers.
• To create a dedicated destination for customer content – For a long time, PRWeb.com has served the dual purpose of educating customers and prospects as well as being the distribution point for customer content. The new architecture will ensure an appropriate segmentation of these two types of content, which will provide us with considerably more flexibility to mold the architecture to solely focus on improving the visibility of customer content.
• To introduce content scalability – We wanted to ensure that the framework we designed and implemented would not only be able to support the hundreds of releases we are publishing on a daily basis today, but the thousands of releases we expect to be publishing daily in the future.

The news center we will be launching over the next month will be oriented towards the fulfillment of the above, stated goals. In addition to some aesthetic changes, you will also see an architecture that is more organized around verticals (i.e. business, finance, technology, etc.) and pages that have a more manageable array of stories.

We fully expect the new architecture will increase the visibility of customer content in search and also drive more traffic to both their PRWeb news releases as well as their own Web sites. As always, we’re happy to get your feedback in the comments section of this blog.

A Sneak Preview of the PRWeb News Center was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

If you took an informal survey today about where people get their commercial information, it’s highly likely most folks would avidly reply: “The Web, of course!” Or, when asked, “where did you hear that?” Their reply? “I ‘Googled’ it!” Easy—and immediate–enough.

But what does this mean behind the scenes? How does “stuff” get “Google-able, “Tweet”-able, or just made ready for a Facebook user to share with their friends?

The answers can seem confusing, and even at times overwhelming, as the “digg-erati” talk about the intricacies of Search Engine Optimization, hash-tags, Web 2.0, mash-ups and more.

When it comes to deciphering new media, remembering that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” is extremely important. You attract customers in much the same way you always have: by having great products and services. Their satisfaction and positive (and negative) impression makes people share stories about you with their friends. You might also snag some coverage in the news media in one form another – local, global or trade.

Through it all, “word-of-mouth advertising” is still in fashion. What has changed is the speed at which the good news (or –“oh no!” bad news) about your business spreads. Thanks to the Internet, the good, bad and the ugly spreads like wildfire.  And, that places new requirements on you to understand how you can facilitate, manage, measure and track that process, so you can attract more customers, stay ahead of the competition and keep your business growing.

We see the success that the new digital world is creating; exciting stories of business growth, and great new relationships formed. We also see some puzzlement – and confusion. People are just not sure where to start first.

Together with some PRWeb partners, we’re putting on an online event to help businesses learn the basics of interactive and online marketing. Its called “Thrive 2010: The ins and Outs of Online Marketing.”  It focuses on the fundamental tools and strategies for achieving success in the new digital world – but, in simple language.

Many of us who live in this new-fangled social media world took a leap to get here. We had to figure out how it all worked–the best practices for helping our own businesses and our customers tap the power of social media and Web 2.0 technologies to take marketing and its revenue impact to new heights. And, now, tweeting, sharing, blogging and all the other “stuff” that goes along with social media is actually pretty fun. What life and work should be all about, right?

What are your thoughts, or emotions, about leaping into the new digital world?

Are You “Tweet-able?” was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Just a quick note that last Friday we updated the search tool on PRWeb.com and moved it from the self-contained domain, Newspad.com, to a sub-folder on PRWeb.  Functionality-wise, we have simplified the results and focused solely on the news releases themselves as opposed to the blended approach we were taking previously.

We’ll be doing some things to optimize the search experience moving forward but in general our goal was to simplify the experience and move it into the PRWeb.com domain.

Updated search on PRWeb.com was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com

Some of you may have noticed that we’ve recently made a few updates to our Web site.  We’ve been tracking some of the questions and comments about the changes and wanted to take the opportunity to explain our rationale behind the changes to the site.  First a bit of background about the site.

PRWeb.com has always served multiple functions.  First and foremost, it has served to get customer news releases picked-up in search engines online.

In addition it has served the following primary functions:

1. To educate new users and help them sign-up and use the service.
2. Place for existing users to view their releases and log-in.
3. Destination for people interested in reading and subscribing to our news.
4. Resource for Web publishers interested in syndicating our news.

It has been over three years since we made any significant changes to the site and in that time, we have made many additions and subtractions to different sections on the site to better serve all the different audiences and as with most technical projects, the result had been something of a patchwork quilt.

At the beginning of the year we got together as a team and outlined several basic goals for redesigning the Web site:

• Organize the architecture of the site in a more unified manner;
• Simplify experience for all user groups by eliminating areas that don’t receive any traffic;
• Make it easier for new users to learn about our service and sign-up;

We then talked with our customers and learned about the different types of Web site resources and information they were interested in that we didn’t currently have.  We also looked exhaustively into how we could restructure the site to not only preserve the search engine visibility provided to our customer’s news releases but increase them as well.

The Web site you see is the synthesis of these different goals.

In addition to eliminating areas of the site that don’t receive any traffic we have rolled out a Tools & Tips section of the Web site that is exclusively devoted to providing freely accessible white papers and educational videos for new and existing customers and a customer examples section where we highlight examples of current customer releases as well as customer success stories.

Our initial results have been positive.  Not only has overall traffic to our site (and customer releases) increased, but the new tools and simplified architecture has made it easier for people to navigate our site and find the resources they need.

As mentioned, we spent a great deal of time studying the potential SEO impact of the changes before launching and our initial research shows that the simplification of the Web site is starting to have a positive net impact on the search performance of our customer’s content.

The updates to the Web site were a long time coming and we are confident that they will help provide an enhanced experience for all the different groups that use PRWeb.

PRWeb.com Web site Updates was posted at Blogging PRWeb. | http://www.bloggingprweb.com