Spring cleaning.

• Position: UPFRONT

In case you haven't noticed, we've redesigned our website, www.BusinessNC.com. We like its new look, and from the response so far, so do our visitors. We started the process about a year ago. The goal: a cleaner design that was easier to navigate. Unlike a lot of businesses, we didn't have to worry about content--not with 30 years' worth of stories about, data on and analysis of the state's economy. The problem was how it was organized.

We generated so much that it couldn't all go on the old site, even the contents of current issues, not to mention past ones. And what we did put up often was hard to find. Frankly, our website resembled that closet in which you pile everything you can't find a proper place for. But instead of old board games, fishing rods and tennis rackets, ours had past profiles of top business and political leaders, lists of the largest this and that and the kind of in-depth features found nowhere else. All of it was valuable stuff (as is, of course, the contents of your closet) but difficult to access (like the singing Big Mouth Billy Bass stashed behind the velvet Elvis in mine).

When we did our last redesign five years ago, we were convinced that the site shouldn't be simply a rehash of what was in the monthly magazine, republishing what had appeared in ink on paper in electronic form. So the home page focused on the Daily Digest, our morning roundup of top business stories from across the state. Though that proved very popular, we discovered that many visitors--some knowing nothing about the magazine--were extremely interested in its content, which is what drew them to the site in the first place. They were...