New Design...Why?

RES Free Thinking is building a small but loyal following throughout Canada, and to a lesser extent on Wall Street and in The Valley. As it turns out, although originally targeted to only a few hundred Bay Street insiders, RES Free Thinking now appears to be viewed regularly by several thousand readers across the country. Surprisingly, there also appears to be a loyal user base from some countries in the EU, South America and Southeast Asia.

Usage is increasing by about 15% per month, over 46% of all users return at least once a month to get information, and over 170 external sites link to RES Free Thinking content of some type. Since its launch in November of 2008, there have been 105 posts to the blog, profiling dozens of North American technology companies; micro-cap to monolith-cap, both public and private. In addition, there have been several theme or sectoral posts - and the odd political rant.

What does this mean?

Well, there is a lot of content, a lot of people are looking for the content, and a lot of people link to the content. I wanted to find a way to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for faster. I also wanted to find an easy way for people to discover the theme of a story over time, and to be able to connect together industry trends (example: progress (or not) of a Company over multiple quarters). My goal is also to highlight more effectively the flow of information and good ideas emanating from sources such as Twitter. 

The old design was limited by a single dimension (no horizontal navigation menu), and by only two columns - one of which was reserved for posts. As a result, all of the ways to find and use blog information was stuffed into a single long column. As the archive of posts became longer, interesting and timely investor information had been falling off the screen - such as TwitterFlow and Tech Voices.