BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
We are delighted to present the all new BikeBiz.com, which we’ve released as a public beta following several months of alpha testing.
The site is the culmination of an eight month development project, encompassing a state of the art site framework, a brand new content management system (CMS) and integration of a best of breed advertising platform.
What does all that mean? Quite simply, it means all the cycle industry news and analysis you already love, packaged in a form conducive to our web-centric, socially-networked age.
And because it’s so cutting edge, we want your your help and feedback as we fine-tune the new-look BikeBiz over the coming weeks. But more on that later. First, let’s take a look around.
The focal point of the site itself is the Home Stream, which not only channels all the content uploaded to the site (News, Features, Events, Jobs), but can also be customised by the reader.
In fact, one of our key objectives has been to put you in control. There’s a new account management area where you can manage all your BikeBiz preferences and services.
We also want to stimulate debate on the site, so by popular demand we’ve re-introduced the ability to comment directly underneath articles (providing you have registered – another way we are ensuring the trade-only nature of the site). You can even choose to ‘follow’ comment threads so you never miss the debate.
We’ve also completely overhauled the BikeBiz Forum, again using best of breed software that will enable you to interact with your industry peers in the ways you’ve been calling for.
Did someone mention social networking? You can now follow BikeBiz on our official Twitter, Linked In and Facebook pages. Not only that, but you now have the ability to share articles you like across your own Twitter and Facebook accounts, direct from the page.
The Marketplace has also been overhauled so that everyone registering with the site can give their company a basic listing – with a paid for premium option allowing you to add in a full company profile and extensive contact details (including social network accounts) for either a six or 12 month period.
Historically, the Jobs Board has been one of the busiest parts of the BikeBiz website, so we’ll be rolling out some significant updates over the next couple of weeks to enable you to post and manage your vacancies, in addition to submitting applications, with minimum fuss.
And that’s not all. In the next few days we’ll be rolling out our new-look Daily Digest and Newsflash email services, in addition to a few other bells and whistles.
In keeping with the famous BikeBiz community spirit, we’re encourage you to help us put the site through its paces over the next few weeks during its ‘beta’ release.
What we’re after is positive, constructive feedback. Can we change the colour scheme to blue? Probably not. Can we fix a broken link? Absolutely.
You can use our new Forum to talk to us – our team of designers and developers are waiting in there now to pick up on anything you flag up and deal with it as quickly as possible. They’re a friendly bunch, so don’t be shy!
