Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to be the first to welcome you to the brand new eMercedesBenz. It’s been approximately six months in the making, and we think it turned out mighty fine, if we do say so ourselves. In designing the new site, we tried to focus on three key areas: 1) bringing you more content, and making it simple to find exactly what you’re looking for; 2) enhancing the visual imagery on the site and vastly improving photo management; and 3) incorporating community-oriented features and allowing you to add to the content.
We think we were able to accomplish all three in rather successful fashion. Firstly, there’s the content. An immediate difference you’ll notice is the addition of a lifestyle section. With the new site we wanted to bring you more than just straight Mercedes news, we wanted to bring you products and services that we think you’ll enjoy – things that define their respective fields, if you will. We’ll be bringing you products and services in a total of eight categories ranging from style, technology and travel all the way to a beautiful woman or two. It’s going to be a lot of fun, and we think your going to enjoy it. Then there’s the automotive content. Thanks to the dynamic nature of the new site, we’ll be able to bring you more stories in less time. We’ve added categories, tags and an improved search function to help you find what you’re looking for. We’ve also thrown in RSS Feeds for all stories as well as each of the categories and subcategories, so if you’re interested in following a particular subject via RSS, you’re all set.
Secondly, there’s the site’s imagery. We wanted to give you an instant snapshot of what to expect from each article, so we incorporated a bold image for many of the featured stories. As for the galleries, you can now navigate through each gallery, select from a list of thumbnails, and if you prefer, supersize the image ala the old eMercedesBenz simply by clicking on it.
And thirdly, there’s the social features. You can now share your thoughts and opinions on any story via a new commenting feature. You’ll need to sign up for a free account (it takes about 30 seconds), and after that you can comment on anything. You can also subscribe to comments via email, so if you comment on a post and want to be notified of any follow-up comments, you won’t have to keep checking the story page. If you’re a Twitter or Facebook fan (who isn’t anymore?), you can now send stories to both these services along with a host of social sites. You can also email articles to friends/family via the icons on the story pages, making sharing articles a whole lot easier.
And that’s it, the new site in a nutshell. A few quick caveats: you’ll notice many of the old stories aren’t present on the new site. You’re right, and we’re working on it as we speak. Unfortunately we have to manually add each of the old stories, so it’s going to take some time before the full eMercedesBenz archive is categorized, tagged and searchable. In the meantime, you can still browse old stories by heading to the bottom footer of the site and finding the “Legacy Archive” section and browsing old posts by date. Secondly, you’ll notice the Lifestyle Section is a little barren. Due to time constraints we weren’t able to populate it before launch, but we’ll be adding to it daily, so it should grow to a nice plump category in no time. And lastly, don’t worry if some of the pages you’re viewing look a little off – we’re going to be tweaking the site’s design over the next week and fixing some bugs here and there. Of course, if you find anything you’d like to make sure we’re aware of, drop us a line and we’ll make sure it’s on our to-do list.
And with that, I encourage you to stop reading this post and enjoy the new site. Grab a username, start commenting and have fun, because we did it for you.
Enjoy ladies and gentlemen.