We’ve been mov­ing our­selves and our clients to a new kind of web­site — mag­a­zine style sites that allow an orga­ni­za­tion to put a lot of infor­ma­tion right up front and that make it easy for the reader to quickly find what it is they’re look­ing for.

For orga­ni­za­tions that have reg­u­lar blogs, it’s always been dif­fi­cult to keep old blogs, even great pieces, front and cen­ter. New blogs push old blogs far­ther and far­ther down. That’s the way it was.

With mag­a­zine style web pages, every­thing changes. Lots of arti­cles can share the front-page, orga­nized by cat­e­gory, so dozens of sto­ries can get attention.

Most impor­tant of all — mag­a­zine style blogs have one unique fea­ture that lift them above 99% of all the blogs on earth: a date­line. The date­line, stream­ing right across the top, announces that your web­site is much more than brochure­ware. A date-lined web­site says:

“We’re com­mit­ted to bring­ing you what­ever is new and impor­tant the moment we learn about it.”

The date­line give a rea­son to your com­mu­nity to return to your site fre­quently since they can depend on you to bring them what they need to know when they need to know it.

Yes, run­ning a mag­a­zine site com­mits you to a lot of think­ing and a lot of com­mu­ni­cat­ing. The great part is that you’ll be build­ing a knowl­edge­able and appre­cia­tive com­mu­nity of sup­port­ers, allies, refer­rers, and customers.