What the revamped website looks like.

Well, blow me down but Business Day has a new-look website — and very pleasing it is too! It often seems to me that Business Day and BDFM in general is treated as the poor step-sister in the Avusa family (BDFM is a joint venture, which means it is owned jointly by Avusa and Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times of London).

So while much attention is lavished on Avusa’s Times Live, Business Day’s website seems to have trundled along in a very low-key fashion for many years. Quite frankly, I find this very odd as Business Day actually has something unique that users out there might well be prepared to pay for: It is the country’s premier business publication and consistently turns out thoughtful analysis and comment on SA’s business and political worlds by experienced writers such as Tim Cohen, Eusebius McKaiser, Dave Mars and Hilary Joffe.

Giving their unique content away for free has always struck me as even odder as it must be culling the circulation of the print publication.  (And, in fact, editor Peter Bruce has said he suspects as much but then why would you listen to him — he’s only the editor.)

But back to the revamped website: it’s more cleanly designed with more white space, bigger font sizes, more thumbnails in colour — generally more lively but also more professional looking. There’s no irritating bells and whistles: the new design gets the job done, which is to convey information to busy businesspeople. It is also much easier to access the blog zone.   Click here to read a blog post by Business Day’s Des Latham on the recent changes.

The general gist of the thinking behind the changes — and Peter Bruce was involved in the redesign — is that the paper’s copy will no longer be fed arbitrarily onto the site but that there will  be more thought given to what should be flagged and how things should be weighted in order to make it more user-friendly. It sounds like someone’s actually being paid to be an online editor. That’s excellent news and well overdue.

The only criticism I have is that it seems slow but I’m sure that’s just the usual bugs and gremlins that come with a redesign and it will all be sorted out soon. Click here to go to the new-look Business Day.

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