Ringing the new changes
It’s a new year and, for ITW, not exactly a new website, but certainly a refresh of our old one. Since moving to a monthly webzine format we’ve picked up a lot of readers. Thousands of you turn up each month to find out about the latest titles from ITW authors, and browse through our growing bank of articles.
This poses challenges for an organization that is reliant on volunteers to keep a site like this running. One is just storing the stuff in a way in which you can find it. Another is reducing the workload on the people who keep this site online. The redesign you see here is an attempt to do both. We hope you’ll find it even easier to navigate our site and locate what you want. At the same time we’ve moved to a new system and a new hosting service, so that we’re now on the same technology as publishers such as the Washington Post and Time magazine.
In short, we hope the site is faster to use and more reliable than ever. Like all websites, it’s a work in progress, of course. And we hope to bring you more features, organically, piece by piece, in the near future, as well as extending the range of our editorial coverage. If you look at the new articles by our contributors this month you can see already that we’re covering much more than just the latest books. Under our editor, Joe Moore, we’re developing a stellar editorial team of practicing writers, who will bring you interviews and insights you’ll be hard pressed to find elsewhere.
The next target in our sights is an improved member directory. We have something in beta testing already, and I hope the finished article will be with you before the end of this month. It looks very exciting - thought its success will depend on individual members seizing the opportunity it offers.
We are, at heart, a voluntary organization, and always will be. On that note I’d just like to say thanks to the team that has made this transition possible - our editor, Joe Moore, Shirley Kennett on the ThrillerFest front, new books editor, Becky Cantrell, and news editor, Kelli Stanley. Also our excellent team of contributors, and our new membership editor, Karen Dionne. They’ve worked very hard, and today you can see the results.
David Hewson
Publisher
ThrillerFest
ITW's annual celebration of the thriller world is the largest event of its kind, a meeting place for authors, readers, budding writers, and publishing industry professionals.
For 2011, we’ll be back in the heart of New York in July with the ThrillerFest conference including CraftFest and AgentFest.
ThrillerFest VI will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.
The dates will be July 6-9, 2011.
More information to follow.
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