ESF 2.0

February 4th, 2008 at 03:14am David Bush - Iasta

Some of you may have noticed a new facade to E-Sourcing Forum on Friday. Please, join me on a brief tour of your new surroundings with updated amenities abound. Some of the highlights include:

1. New Presentation: The last design was fine and worked, but honestly, the pink hue that existed on some monitors always bothered me greatly. As ESF grew and grew, so did the embarrassing pinkness. You will notice that I have really tricked out this theme to match our other sites a little better with sharper lines and the triumphant return of Blood Red / Crimson as the dominant color.
2. Aggregators: On the right side of the banner, there are now two new tabs labeled Sourcing News and Sourcing Blogs. These are brand new areas of the site that are pulling RSS feeds from important locations such as Spend Matters, Sourcing Innovation, SS | Europe, ELP, Purchasing Magazine, CPO Agenda and many others.
3. Structure: This is pretty obvious, but now the Date, Comments and Author are in the header of each post while the categories have moved to the bottom. Registering and Log in are now at the page footer, as well.
4. Upgrade: We upgraded to Wordpress 2.3.2 and also changed the captcha technology. Trackbacks were removed a long time ago, so sorry if you ever needed that. The new captcha should be much easier to read. I hope it works, I have been through 4 different ones and the bots cracked all of them. The last one was very good but also could stump a human, which is not the intended purpose.
5. Web 2.0 enhancements: ESF now supports Digg and del.icio.us. Not everyone will use or need this, but it can be pretty cool and might even give you some of social networking experience to speak about and understand the trends!
6. Traffic Map: This is my favorite enhancement. I found this utility last month while I was working on the redesign. It is a mesmerizing little application that graphically tracks the visitors who come to the ESF home page. Obviously, a lot of traffic back doors its way in from links and search engines, but this is neat tool that shows where active readers are in real time. Statistically speaking, its probably pretty accurate for the reader distribution.

That’s about everything noticeable. Special thanks to Matt and Moses at Iasta HQ for their help, I am very happy with the final outcome and appreciate any comments and patience while any tweaks are needed.

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Entry Filed under: General, Technology / SaaS