Editorial: Changing with the times

Federal Computer Week launched its redesigned Web site last week. That is not something we would usually need to explain, except that we hope the changes on FCW.com provide a better way to bring you information.

The primary mission of Federal Computer Week and FCW.com remains the same: to bring you desirable and useful information. Our goal, as always, is to do that more effectively.

The redesign began because of our growing appreciation of the Web’s importance. FCW has been at the forefront of Web publishing. Several years ago, when we redesigned Federal Computer Week, we realized that you probably get most of your daily news online. Federal Computer Week remains a news magazine. We see these pages as part of an agreement with our readers that we will tell you what you must know and why you need to know it.

By contrast, FCW.com is akin to the traditional wire services that report…well, just about everything. But we realized that we were not organizing it in the most effective way for you to find what you want.

The new FCW.com accommodates the wealth of information that we publish each week and makes it easier to find the information that you want the most. FCW.com is still — first and foremost — a source for daily news. But the Web site also provides access to multimedia content, digital archives of print and online articles, hundreds of government documents, vendor white papers and other source materials — all of which are ways for us to share information.

We have added multiple entry points throughout the site, beginning with the home page, so you can easily jump from one feature to the next. We have also added numerous design elements to make it easier to navigate the site. And its organization more closely mirrors the design of the magazine, in which stories fall into one of four different sections: technology, policy, management and business.

We hope this is just a starting point. Our goal is to never launch another Web site redesign. We want this new Web site to be a platform for ongoing innovation so that the site will be different next year than it is today.

Let us know what you like — and what you don’t. And keep watching for ongoing changes online.