New Reger.com Homepage and Content

A redo of the Reger.com site. Actually, the start of a redo. Launched this evening. The old site was simple but sterile. A couple big changes:

1) All pages adhere to a heirarchy and that heirarchy is reflected in the left side navigation. Previously I had grown the signup site organically and it felt disjointed. Getting things into a framework is a start.

2) I do a better job of explaining what the hell reger.com is and does. A better homepage graphic was the result of an email I sent out a week ago where I exclaimed (paraphrasing) "crap... seven years and I still haven't been able to put together a homepage that just says data plus blogging is datablogging." It was clear in my head so I went into photoshop and tried to get it out to the screen. I went through a number of crappy iterations before I settled on this graphic.

Another motivation was something that Bob Wyman said to me a while back. He said (paraphrasing) "you've got all these cool charts and graphs, but that's not apparent on the homepage". He was right. So the "How do People use datablogging?" page is a first attempt at showing people just a few of the ways that real people can track data and get cool charts and graphs.

3) Clear breakdown of consumer usage vs. business usage. Two big honkin' buttons on the homepage lead visitors in one of two directions.

4) Actual use cases of how people/businesses can use datablogging. Yeah, who'da thunk it... making it relevant to people... marketing 101.

5) A What is Reger.com page? I get asked this all the time and after putting things into the framework I realized why: I never tell people on the site. So I have a big honkin' button that leads to a page with big yellow numbers telling you what we are.

So, this is a start... still a lot to do before I'm proud of the Reger.com public signup site.

a) Remove the cruft. Years of marketing cruft has built up. I need to kill a lot of pages.

b) More use cases. Especially on the business section.

c) Better community section. Requires some coding.

d) One big piece that I'm still missing is pricing info. I need to make it clear up front that you get a free 15 day trial and then the site reverts to banners.

e) Pictures and short bios of the team. Me. Joe Sr. Kendra. Mark. John. Marty. Pawan. Uli. Joern. Gotta show the world the smart people working on this mutha Xxxka!

Still a long way to go, but this looks a hell of a lot better.

The thing that incited this riot of content rebuilding was the need for the framework. Our newest client is going to need to have more of a content management solution on the public marketing side. I'm still testing that code and should launch it by next Monday. But as I got that code ready late last week I realized that I had to get the starting point in order.

Thinking of having Kendra, my father, Mark and John over for working sessions Mon/Tue/Wed of next week. I'll put up the site on the projector and we'll work through it. Not talk about it. Work on it there. More eyeballs = more good content.

Onward!

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