We've won a PPA award so we had to do something. This morning we have introduced a few changes to Brand Republic improving navigation, but most importantly introducing a new and much improved community. We have been working on this for a good while as one of the big successes of Brand Republic when we relaunched it last spring was the community, which saw Brand Republic introduce blogs for the first time. The initial software we used was not the most flexible - it was something we have always wanted to improve and we have done that today.From the homepage onwards you will see the first of the changes with the new dual navigation bar at the top making it not only easier to find your way around Brand Republic, but also to find content on the site that you never even knew was there. You will also be able to see the first signs of improvements to community on the homepage with stories and blogs on the homepage now indicating how many comments readers have made allowing people to get an immediate feel for debate taking place on the site.The heart of the changes can be seen in the forum pages where you will see a new layout breaking forums and blogs down into "Most Recent" and "Most Discussed".Inside individual forums themselves you will see more information about individual users' posting and ways of contacting them. You will also be able to rate individual forums, posts and add them and other users as favourites.Like a social networking site you can now build up lists of friends, which you can manage under "My profile" section that you will also see in community. The blogs area is one part of Brand Republic where we hope there will be plenty of fresh content for you to see in the coming weeks and months.We already have a team of bloggers on board but we plan to add plenty more. A dozen or so are already signed up, but we are looking for more new bloggers. Contact me if you want to join Brand Republic's community of bloggers.Browsing individual bloggers and seeing what they have written about has been made much easier. Mostly because our blogs now look much more like traditional blogs than they did before.There is a full archive of each blogger month by month and posts can also easily be browsed by tags as well.All blogs have their own RSS feeds so if you want to add any of our bloggers to your RSS feeds it is easier to do than ever. The ability to rate blog posts has also been introduced.Another important change is that you can search across all blogs and forum posts making this area of the site as useful as we hope you find the rest of Brand Republic.We hope you like the changes and please let us know what you think.
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Changes?? OMG, saw your tweet; had to come right over. Am sure there are many functional improvements, but am missing the beautiful curve at top....sniff
The demise of the curve...sorry, you'll have to let us know what your thoughts.
Nice work Gordon!
Nice touch....
Looks good. Hope it gets more people posting / commenting.
Yes, big improvement.
Works for me... so far... fingers crossed.
As to the new Guardian CiF 'improvement', or the recent BBC blogging 'upgrade'.... grrrr.
ok, loving the new profile area. Tho maybe I need some friends... will go check the forums ;-)
Gordon Macmillan
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 03 Jul 2009
Total Posts: 1,472
