Business Wire Announces New Website Design, SEO, and Multimedia Features

  

Following a successful soft launch in December, we are glad to officially announce our new website upgrade. Over the next few blog posts we’ll discuss the changes we made on our site. The overarching theme of all these updates is making the content we distribute on behalf of our clients as accessible as possible to all the different user groups who look for it, and in the ways they look for it. First, our new and improved website design and accessibility. 

So how is the new website design different and better now? Here’s what we did:

Redesign: 

After successfully introducing a few new international websites in 2007, we were ready to shower our main website with some additional attention as well. So in order to make the site look more up-to-date we decided to make it a bit cleaner, less cluttered, and make more effective use of white space. We’ve also reorganized some of our pages in a way that makes important content visible to those looking for it, and in a way that fits the ways in which they look for it. Below is a screen grab of the new homepage design:

  

    

In addition to the improved look-and-feel, the new homepage structure strikes a good balance between offering news content and highlighting Business Wire’s key products and services. It highlights various important products such as our PR, IR, and Media services, while still displaying our news feed in a visible place on the page. It also highlights more clearly many important features such as our RSS links, tradeshow news, Business Wire’s own news, and more. This updated look and structure extends to our internal pages as well. Here is a screenshot of our new Products and Services section: 

 

 

Search and User Visibility: 

On the accessibility front, we’ve updated our website code to include improved labeling and tagging of different parts of our pages, in order to make it easier for search engines to spider our content; made it simpler and leaner under the hood so that pages load faster; optimized the site for some newer versions of web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari; and switched to a unified URL structure that also makes our content more search friendly and enables more accurate traffic measurement. All these increase the likelihood of our clients’ press releases showing up higher in search results, and of users being able to more easily and quickly access our clients’ releases.

Search Engine Optimization is a moving target, and there are no silver bullets. However, we continuously enhance our SEO efforts. Examples of this include offering our EON: Enhanced Online News search and social-media-ready platform; continuously providing our clients with tips and best practices on how to better communicate in the new media landscape and make their content as web-friendly as possible; and helping clients understand how to combine SEO efforts across press releases, new online services, and their own websites. Our continuous upgrades, like the one we’ve announced today, is another example of how keep making our content as accessible as possible.  We encourage you to check out our new site design, and as usual, feel free to let us know what you think.

The official press release is here. Stay tuned for more on our multimedia and sharing updates.

New Surveys and Rankings Show Business Wire’s Strong Presence in Both Traditional and New Media

 

As the blogsphere establishes itself as a meaningful and reliable source of information — with some tech, media, and political blogs wielding as much influence as, if not more than, some traditional media outlets in certain areas — we at Business Wire are happy to see that we are still able to continually serve both worlds well.  

A recent journalist survey by the Arketi Group found that news releases are used by 90% of business journalists as sources for story ideas, sharing the top spot with industry sources. 54% of journalists mentioned they currently use blogs for story ideas, while 84% said they may report on stories that originated from blogs.  

A larger survey with a slightly different focus, conducted by PR industry news site Bulldog Reporter and online newsroom provider TEKGroup (fair disclosure: all the above mentioned companies have ties with Business Wire), shows that 69% of journalists follow at least one blog regularly, 44% visit social media sites at least monthly, 37% are subscribed to at least one RSS feed, and 20% actively seek multimedia content from companies at least once a month. (this survey also shows some different data on commercial wire services. Michael Tangeman of Media Mindshare makes a few interesting observations on methodology and findings).

Finally, the recently published Techmeme Leaderboard, which ranks websites based on how frequently their stories appear on Techmeme’s increasingly popular technology news application, places Business Wire as its 24th highest source for news (as of the writing of this post), with similar ranking to traditional news organizations as the Wall Street Journal and the BBC, and blogs such as Search Engine Land and PaidContent.org.  

In recent years Business Wire has put substantial effort into enhancing our multimedia capabilities for video, audio, and photo distribution; enabling our EON: Enhanced Online News search-optimized platform; introducing social media sharing features; reaching new-media sites and platforms; and creating robust RSS offerings. These initiatives are intended to help our clients reach end-consumers directly, interact with the blogsphere, and reach the young and young-at-heart generations of journalists who use new technologies and new media as tools and resources for their work.  We are thrilled to see that these efforts are paying off with both new and traditional media, as indicated by the Arketi and Bulldog Reporter/TEKGroup surveys and Techmeme’s Leaderboard. 

Malcolm Atherton, our eloquent and new-media-savvy account executive, who is one of the strong proponents of our digital media offerings, provides some great info in an interview with podcast site Rocky Mountain Voices during the recent Blogging for Business conference in Salt Lake City. Malcolm sums it all up fantastically. Check it out:

Posted by Ken Zamkow, Director of Product Development, Business Wire

Yahoo! Finance Debuts Business Wire XHTML Feed

Today is a very satisfying day for many of us at Business Wire and we think it’s also a good day for investor relations. After several years of development and more than a year of working with our downstream partners, Business Wire’s XHTML feed is now being carried on Yahoo! Finance.

Why is this important? XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) enables us and IR professionals to break a decades-long limitation in how earnings tables are transmitted, presented and re-utilized. Limitations in data feeds and ANPA and ASCII languages and technology have meant that tables could be no longer than 70 characters in width, could not support underlines, bold text or bulleted lists. This means tables are often difficult for humans to read and harder for computers to parse in today’s automated times.

Earnings Tables that are Easier for Humans and Computers

Enter XHTML. With XHTML, we present tables that closely mirror how they appear in their original spread sheet format. Wider, with underlined headers and numbers. And they are more easily readable by humans and electronic systems. For humans, the benefits are obvious.

Look at these two examples of tables:

• The first, issued by Business Wire as it appears on Yahoo! Finance has white space, bolded headers, bulleted lists and clearly readable and aligned tables.
  
• The second, issued by a competitor as it appears on Yahoo! Finance, is still limited by the ASCII/ANPA restrictions.

Each element of the Business Wire NewsML press release in XHTML is tagged – the content within the headline, body copy, tables, contact information, etc. so that systems can find and utilize the exact data they need. This ultimately helps news organizations to speed the reporting of earnings results and further levels the playing field for access to corporate financial data.

XHTML enables users to easily cut and paste tables into an Excel spread sheet. With plain text tables, Excel has no idea where or how to parse the information into columns and that usually means lots of reformatting and re-keying of data.

This is a very big “next step” in our ongoing efforts to change the way media, syndicates, financial information services and consumer sites handle content. Our patented Internet “NX” delivery system is the backbone for this system. We have spent countless development hours and invested millions of dollars in building a smarter system to simultaneously deliver rich content to end users. We’re working on getting more systems online with XHTML in the near future.