CPO Rising – Site Navigation and Design

Posted by Andrew Bartolini on July 21st, 2010
Stored in Articles, General

We started CPO Rising because we felt that there was an opportunity to reach/develop/expand an underserved market with interesting articles that provide fresh insight and progressive approaches while also informing, educating, challenging, and even entertaining the reader. Our perspective is progressive, our focus is supply management, and our intended audience is the international community of current and future Chief Procurement Officers and other executive stakeholders. We hope we are meeting these targets and objectives. Our site traffic suggests that we are. That said, we are always trying to improve; so, we welcome your feedback and ideas on how we can do this (posted here or sent by email). We thank you for your support and we appreciate the continued great word of mouth that you are providing about us across your networks. As we now fold CPO Rising under the corporate banner of Ardent Partners, we want to assure you that our publishing will continue as before and that our plans to grow and enhance the site are underway.

Site Navigation and Design

After nearly seven months in operation, it is high time that we spend a few minutes discussing this site’s navigation and overall design and share some tips that we believe will enhance your experience at CPO Rising. From the outset, our focus has been on our content, first and foremost, but our team has also invested significant time and energy in developing a site that we hope is visually appealing and easy to navigate. We continue to invest significant time and energy in these efforts and in delivering the highest-quality content possible.

Homepage

CPO Rising’s homepage shows the site’s ten most recent articles as well as the accompanying visual image and initial sentence or two for each article in a rotating sequence at the top of the screen and in a static, vertical column at the center of the page. You can access a full article by clicking on its Title or the “Read more” prompts or by clicking on the smaller image shown in the vertical column of articles. You can always return to the homepage by clicking the CPO Rising logo or by clicking the “Home” tab at the top center of the page (on the top navigation bar) or by clicking the “Home” tab under the site logo (on the blue navigation bar). There are also site breadcrumbs found below the article image (as shown in red below) that show you where you are on the site.

Article Organization

We have organized the site content into Four Main Sections: General, People, Process, and Technology which can be accessed by hovering over the “Articles” tab on the Blue Navigation bar that is near the top of every page. It helps if you think of this as a dynamic Table of Contents with four main chapters (each chapter has sub-chapters or categories). As shown below, by hovering over “Articles” and then hovering over “General” you can view and then select any of the three sub-chapters under General: Events, Lists, or Strategy and then see a listing of all articles in that sub-chapter (or category).

Latest, Tags, Comments

This section (or widget), which is located on the right-hand navigation bar, provides links to the site tags and the latest articles and comments.

Tags

Each article is “tagged” with several key words or themes (called “tags”) that help better describe and reference it. The size of each tag (as shown below) is based upon the number of articles that reference the tag (i.e. the larger the tag, the more frequently it has been referenced on CPO Rising). Clicking any tag will bring you to the complete list of articles that hit upon that subject or theme.

Archives and Categories

Located below the Latest/Tags/Comments ‘widget’ on the right-hand sidebar, these two sections allow you to search the site by date and category.

Top Navigation Bar

The top navigation bar is located at the top right of every page and provides links to information about the site and to our RSS feed.

RSS Feeds

If you would like to subscribe to CPO Rising via Google Reader, Bloglines, email, or some other application, select RSS from the main navigation bar and choose your platform (i.e. Google) from the pulldown menu and “Subscribe Now.”

Blue Navigation Bar

The blue navigation bar is available on every page and provides a “Home” and an “Articles” link as well as our site search window.

Site Search

Enter a key word or phrase into the search window and the results will show every article that includes the search terms.

Similar Articles

If you enjoy an article and want to read articles with similar themes that have been published on the site, you can select any of the “categories” as shown below or by selecting any of the tags at the bottom of the article.

Posting a Comment

You are able to make a comment at the bottom of every article. We encourage you to join in the conversation. While you do need to provide an email address, it is not shared with the readership and is not included in any database for any future purpose.

External links in articles

We include hyperlinks (links to other websites or pages) in the articles to enhance the reading experience. Much in the same way that we use very specific words, terms, themes, writing styles, and other devices to create a certain feel or tone to an article, we also go to great lengths to find the right links and associations for each article. When we include a link we are trying to do one or more things: emphasize or better support an idea, provide a specific reference or footnote for informational purposes, enhance a discussion while also limiting the text used on it in the article, leverage other great content and media, share something we appreciate, entertain, make a joke, and/or to tie the article or theme together. We understand that sometimes we include a few too many links and that there will be times when a link may not achieve its intended purpose; we apologize in advance, for what we hope are very rare occasions. For the next few weeks, we are going to have these links open a new tab (instead of taking you from CPO Rising to the new site in the same tab/window). Let us know what you think about this change and of course, what you like, dislike, etc. about our links in general.

Social Media – Sharing Articles and Spreading the Word

Each article contains an automatic link to series of social media platforms. If you are registered on any of the selected platforms, simply click the platform logo and you will be able to share the specific article with your network or friends or followers, etc. The platforms with automatic linkages are Delicious, Digg, Furl, Reddit, Stumble Upon, Technorati, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

We hope this discussion has been helpful.

One small favor

If you enjoy the content on CPO Rising, please consider spending 30 seconds (now and then) to share a favorite or recent article with your network. For example, we know many of you are on Linkedin; in just a few clicks you can share an article with your network and with your groups. The word-of-mouth element has been the biggest factor to date in driving our readership.

We appreciate the time and consideration that you take on our behalf to share our site with the community of your choice on your platform of choice. Thanks again!

Tagged in:

Share this post