Website redesigns are vital projects that don’t happen often enough for most of us to get good at them. Developers and designers know exactly what they need to do, but struggle because the rest of the players often … don’t. Here are some guidelines for assigning responsibilities to make your next website redesign more successful.

Publishers tend to approach online directories with a path to least resistance mindset: create a yellow pages-like directory specific to their niche, sell listings to vendors in that space, and publish them. They give little thought to improving either the advertiser or the user experience – and then get frustrated when the products don’t meet their revenue goals.

Many B2B publishers are sitting on a gold mine of rich data disguised as dusty old directories, sold to libraries and a dwindling population of industry customers who order more out of habit than need.  Even when those directories are turned into an online application, they rarely deliver on their potential to be significant revenue drivers.  Directories often get moved online in ways that make them hardly any more useful than the printed product, with clunky interfaces that discourage users from digging into the information.  That’s a shame, because even a moderately s

Whether you have a $100,000 online business and are considering a $30,000 investment in a new website or a $10 million business looking into a $1.5 million redesign project, the discussion often starts with a question about the capabilities of the current content management system (CMS). Building a case for a new CMS can be daunting, since you are essentially trying to prove that an investment that could equal a year’s emedia profits will lead to explosive growth down the road.

Developing an effective commission plan requires media companies to take their eyes off their spreadsheets and think about how the business has changed.  Every CFO wants a commission structure that motivates sales reps toward accomplishing the company's goals while maintaining financial discipline, but finding that balance isn't so easy.  

Here are four factors to consider when building commission plans for next year:

It’s a given that you need a mobile version of your website in order to deliver a good user experience on a mobile phone.  But does the content itself need to be tweaked as well? You bet it does.

Assuming you have a mobile version of your site, can’t you just strip out the graphics, images, pdfs and flash and call it a day?  If you want to make your content useful on a mobile device, you’ll need to do more.

Here are 5 factors to consider for publishing to mobile platforms:

Recent research from FOLIO’s eMedia reality check offers some insights as to why media companies have been so dramatically affected by this recession. Underfunded and understaffed, the online initiatives of many publishers were too nascent to pick up the slack when the bottom fell out of print. Some of the numbers are outright disturbing: