Introducing The New CRN.com

First, the new CRN site will be organized to better showcase the content we have, including new stories, investigative pieces, slide shows, videos and podcasts. We also hope to strike a balance with timely and timeless issues you grapple with day in and day out. Technologies and vendors change, and we’ll keep you on top of those changes with our news. But the VAR community and the issues around channel conflict, business growth and investments remain the same. And we want to aggregate and offer advice on these tried-and-true topics. What’s more, we’ll continue to offer our marquee projects such as the VAR500 and Fast Growth 100 with even more bells and whistles.

The navigation will also be different. We’ll put in place a new taxonomy that drills down three levels to enable better targeting of technologies, channel programs and VAR pain points. We’ve also added some topics such as cloud and data center.

And we’ll be launching “mini home pages” by topic. These pages will look very similar to our home page but offer specific content around networking, security, applications and OSes, cloud, components and peripherals, storage, client devices, data center, and channel programs. Each mini home page will deliver all the relevant content including video, slide shows and articles around that topic area. We understand your need to specialize and stay on top of key technology areas, and we are hoping these pages will be your go-to place.

Did you know that we have 70,000 pieces of content that have been posted to our site during the past decade? Some of the information is surely outdated, but some of it still resonates today. And even more, we can glean lessons from our channel history. As part of the relaunch, we will provide a weekly feature called the CRN Vault. Here we’ll look back in time and pull some interesting stories and features from our extensive archives. Sometimes you need to look back to move ahead.

Furthermore, we have invested a lot of our editorial resources into video, and you’ll see more video commentary on the site. Most of our staff has more than 10 years of experience reporting on the channel and can provide valuable insight on industry news. To make it easier for you to navigate, we’ll also categorize our videos based on the technology discussed. And we are encouraging VARs to post video onto our community site.

Speaking of community, we have a lot of new features for VARs that want to participate in community and be a part of an ongoing conversation. Sign up for our community newsletter, where we will be highlighting some of the most pertinent discussions of the day. We will also be bringing back ShadowRAM on the community. For those of you who don’t know about ShadowRAM, it was a place for channel insiders with rumors and commentary and was a perennial favorite of our readers.

These are just a few of the new features we will be launching. Please let me know your opinions on the site and any suggestions you have to make it even better.

BACKTALK: Kelley Damore is VP, Editorial Director for Everything Channel. You can reach her via e-mail at [email protected].