Wood: At last, a new website

It was never supposed to take this long.

BizWest.com launched in 2014, after the merger of the Boulder County Business Report and the Northern Colorado Business Report to form BizWest.

And while the site experienced some cosmetic changes in the intervening years, the overall code, design and framework remained largely the same.

Eight years is an eternity for a website, which should be redesigned every two to three years. And it certainly seemed like an eternity for us, a small company that lacked the resources for a full-time web programmer.

And it must have seemed like an eternity for users, who would sometimes complain if the site loaded slowly, as it usually did.

Old code and unused plugins built up. SEO suffered. New features were infrequent.

Plans to relaunch in 2020 were forestalled by the COVID-19 pandemic, as we sought to reduce expenses.

But that’s all changed. Over the Memorial Day weekend, BizWest.com relaunched, with a clean new design created by Linden of Fort Collins and implemented by our own Jacob Fogg.

The new website includes a number of features that we hope will prove popular with readers, including a robust community calendar, which enables users to load their own business or nonprofit events.

We have better linkages to related content, enabling readers to explore other stories about a certain company or topic.

We’ve revamped our About Us, Advertise and Contact Us pages, making them more informative and adding flavor for what makes us tick. (No, we can’t help it if Lucas High is a Ravens fan or Diane Crispin likes the Steelers!)

We’ve cleaned up some messy layout issues, for both desktop and mobile devices.

We’ve added author bios for our staff writers to tell you more about them.

Mobile users, by the way, should see a much more mobile-friendly design.

And more is on the way:

BizWest soon will launch its first apps for iPhone and Android, creating an even easier way for mobile users to access our content.

Additional design tweaks will make the website even friendlier and more useful to readers.

We’ll be adding much more imagery to make the website more attractive and engaging.

We’ll be reviving our podcasts.

We’re adding more video, including interviews with key decision-makers at our many business-oriented events.

We’re redesigning all of our event websites in the coming months.

We’re continuing to add data into our popular DataBank section, bringing thousands of local companies to your desktop.

This is in addition to complementary websites: Breaking Ground, featuring new development projects, and Econowatch, which focuses on economic data and statistics.

So please visit BizWest.com. Explore the latest news offerings. Search through our story archives (more than 70,000!). Click on every button, and let us know if something doesn’t work. Send us your ideas for additional features or changes.

And we promise not to wait eight years to do this again.

Christopher Wood can be reached at 303-630-1942 or cwood@bizwest.com.

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