InfoWorld reloaded!

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.

Rebuilding the site from the bottom up In modernizing our site, we drank our own Kool-Aid and followed a classic process. First, we hired Roundarch, a Web design and consulting firm that performed user research and helped all the stakeholders — including InfoWorld editorial, sales, and the centralized Online Publishing Group that serves technology and design needs across the IDG (InfoWorld’s parent company) — collect and organize requirements.

Exhaustive and meticulous, the requirement-gathering process lasted more than two months, resulting in a level of detail that ensured everyone involved had a clear sense of shared objectives and the resources that would be needed to achieve them. At the end of the process a set of wireframes outlined the functionality of the site and provided a foundation for the design. As many of you who have been involved in such projects know, engaging a professional services firm at that early stage of a project is often essential in getting stakeholders from different parts of an organization on the same page.

Once we nailed down the requirements, we hired Airbag Graphics to create the design you see here. We wanted a more open, engaging, and, well, modern look and feel — and after some intense sessions, we got exactly what we were looking for. Talented designers in the Online Publishing Group adapted and refined the design in template after template. Finally, the Online Publishing Group’s CTO, Ray Anderson, made a bold decision: The new site would be built in Drupal. As open source advocates, InfoWorld editorial was delighted. We knew that the knock on Drupal –“it doesn’t scale” — was a legacy of early iterations. Experience with another IDG site, IT World, convinced Ray that Drupal would be a great solution for InfoWorld and would scale beautifully.

If you’ve worked with Drupal, you know that the out-of-the box functionality is decent, but the true advantage is the almost infinite ability to customize through configuration rather than coding — plus, the array of add-ons contributed by the open source community is an embarrassment of riches. (To learn more about Drupal, check out the InfoWorld Test Center’s comparative review.) We engaged Optaros to help us build the new Drupal site, but developers from the Online Publishing Group also played a major role.

Much credit is also due the InfoWorld editorial team. The effort everyone provided in delivering content management requirements and in testing and troubleshooting new functionality — not to mention working long hours to maintain the old site while we got the new one up and running — has been truly phenomenal.

Now the modernization is complete.

In tech industry tradition, you’ll note that we’re launching in live beta fashion — we’ll be working out kinks and adding new features over the next few weeks, and we’d love to hear suggestions from you (and about any problems you encounter). At InfoWorld, we’re proud to be part of the IT professional community and expect our readers to be vocal. In IT, that comes with the territory, and we thrive on your participation.

We hope we’ve provided a vastly improved platform you can use as a commons to discuss the burning tech issues of the day, and to use a resource in your own modernization efforts.