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Giving Users What They Want
For Ken Citron, SVP and CTO at Rodale Inc. in Emmaus, Pa., the user experience is foremost. The $600-million company publishes magazines, including Men's Health, and books such as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and The South Beach Diet. Citron says capturing readership requires publishers to continually update site content. "You have to keep your Web presence very fresh," he says. So, too, online content needs a different flavor from print. "It's more detail oriented, more tool-specific," he says.
To target online readers, Rodale has adopted multimedia on its 20 Web sites with full force, featuring video that demonstrates exercise routines; tip lists, slide shows and polls; and several blogs. The Bret Baier Project blog, for example, catalogs the highs and lows of a weight loss effort by Fox News Channel's chief White House correspondent. The goal is to provide a forum for users to share problems and solutions.
At $123-million HBSP, a site relaunch this spring will also extend the company into new channels. Over the past year, Lubeck and his 35-person team have revamped the Harvard Business Online site to accommodate readers who want more timely and interactive content. Josh Macht, managing director of new publishing ventures, says the relaunch will turn the existing site -- which sells books, case studies and Harvard Business Review (HBR) articles -- into a more holistic user experience. Featuring more free content that changes daily, the site will also offer new elements in its nine resource centers, which organize content by topics like innovation and leadership. These pages will include webcasts with Harvard Business School professors, blogs hosted by discussion leaders and RSS feeds to which users can subscribe. All these features are designed to give users a "much richer experience," Lubeck says.
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