I have new found respect for what the Zillow folks must go through every time they release a new version of their site.
We just spent the weekend pushing the new Inman News site live.
You can see the result over on Inman.com right now. I should warn you the site is getting hammered right now so it’s running vvveeerrrry slllooowwwly.
To give you some background on the new site:
- We started work on this project almost a year ago, shortly after I joined Inman News.
- The goal was to bring all our web properties (Connect, InmanWiki, News, Blog, InmanTV) under one tent and tie them all together. Easier said than done with multiple platforms and languages (WordPress, Typepad, MediaWiki, ASP, HTML)!
- Inman.com is now a LAMP site.
- We wanted to kick open the doors to the archives and still provide valuable new offerings to Inman members.
- We wanted to explore the social/community side of news like the folks at FastCompany and USAToday did, so we introduced some limited social networking elements to the new site. But we were definitely conscious of ‘social network fatigue’ and didn’t want to replicate experiences already found elsewhere online.
- We also felt it necessary to include a number of new voices in our new home, so we built a fantastic real estate blog network (that includes FOREM, natch) and invited some well known bloggers to join our team.
- The site is built on the Drupal platform, a very powerful open source CMS system; with a ton of customization done by Toolhouse Design, our development team.
- This is only version 1.0 – we have some very cool stuff scheduled on the roadmap, which we hope to be rolling out over the coming months. So stay tuned.
I hope you like it!
