I've heard it said that three months is a lifetime in the world of the Internet. If that's the case, then nine years must be comparable to some sort of geologic time. Internet Ice Ages have come and gone, tectonic plates have shifted, mountains and valleys have been created and destroyed. (Can you say Napster?) So it is hard to believe it has been nine years since the creation of Fluid Power Web, this magazine's online home.
This month marks the debut of our new website. Not only is our new home completely redesigned and easier to use, but it has more content and a new name: www.hydraulicspneumatics.com. I can recall discussions in 1996 about what the site should be called and what the URL should be. We reasoned that the
URL should be as short as possible, so people wouldn't have to type too much. It wasn't until much later that we realized that users would bookmark the site, and generally would only have to type out the URL once. Nowadays, we see all sorts of long URLs — even in our industry, you may have run across www. canfieldconnector.com or www. ultracleantechnologies.com.
The new website will provide all of H&P's editorial, as opposed to the old site's one feature per month. And what's even more exciting is how we're cross-categorizing our editorial. While you can simply check out the latest issue, you can also look up content (including product releases, handbook articles, directory listings, and so forth) by industry or technology zones. The industry zones include: Construction, Entertainment, Agricultural, Marine & Offshore, Mining, Plastics & Injection Molding, Food Processing, Forestry & Lumber, Material Handling, Packaging, Recycling / Waste Management, and Rail & Trucking.
Conversely, the technology zones are component-focused, with areas such as Cylinders, Fittings & Couplings, Hydraulic Filters, Seals, and Vacuum. We feel that these two different ways of "searching" our site will better allow users to quickly and efficiently find what they are looking for.
I encourage you to check out the new www.hydraulicspneumatics.com. Take it for a test drive to see what you think. We're interested in your feedback, so we can continue to make the site more useful to you.
