This week has been probably one of the busiest ones at the eHow HQ. For the past two weeks we’ve been planning and developing various new features as well as additional eHow pages called “Topic” pages. Offhand it may not seem like it, but an explosion of things went out, so we thought it would be nice to give our members a quick overview.
eHow Topic Pages…
Find what you need in our Topic Pages. The eHow Topic Page essentially encompasses and packages all the relevant resources on eHow for a given topic. So, if you happen to be on a photography topic page, you’ll find a bunch of articles related to photography, but the experience is quite intuitive and it helps a normal visitor find what they need with ease. In addition to having access to relevant articles, a Topic Page has relevant Quick Guides and blog postings by a topic expert. The Topic Page is packed with various information. Not to mention that it has applicable community items, such as Groups and Q&A discussions, where you can post up questions and have the community provide answers for you.
List of our Topic Pages:
Feature your five…
Customization makes things fun on the site as well as give a sense of ownership, and we’ve answered the community’s request for this one particular feature. We unveiled this week a new profile tool, where you can pick any 5 articles from your article library and have them featured on your profile page. This allows you to market your articles on your profile and bring more visibility to them.
I Twitter, you Twitter, we all like to Twitter…
Twitter-ing articles has never been this easy for our members. If you go to your email notification setting, you will be able setup your account to automatically send new articles that you’ve contributed to your Twitter account. You can also do the same for any comments you’ve made on articles. This is another great tool to help you promote and market your articles instantaneously.
eHow News Updates…
Did you know we had a blog? Well, if you are reading this, obviously you do, but it’s not surprising many folks do not know we have one. The eHow blog is great to get up-to-date info about the site or just any relevant news that deals with the eHow community. There’s a new small section included on your profile page (on the bottom left corner), where you can click on links to get to the eHow blog or the eHow Twitter. You can start off your daily dose of eHow by checking out the blog and be in the k now with everything and anything about the site.
Spread the word about your published articles…
As soon you publish you articles, you should, as usual, end up on a page that confirms your article being published. Well, on this very page you should now have access to the “Share” button tool, which will allow you to immediately socialize and promote your newly published articles.
Finally…
Have you noticed the site being a little faster than usual? We’ve done some upgrades on our server and pages on eHow should be loading up quicker. No more going through that experience, where you’re navigating through the site and all of a sudden you hit a wall, and the page you want to get to takes awhile to load up. Take a test drive for yourself and you’ll notice quite a difference.
We hope you find these new updates satisfying. A lot of the upgrades were made due to the community’s requests and it’s a never ending effort to continue making the product even more better. To be continued… more new stuff coming soon!
The U.S. government may have just released their stimulus package, but eHow has been stimulating our minds and pocketbooks for quite a while now. It’s no wonder Mashable.com mentioned eHow in two different articles last week. eHow was listed as site numero uno on, “30+ Websites to Visit when You’re Laid Off.” We are proud that our vibrant community has welcomed many new users in the past months. The forums are abuzz with old members showing the newbies the ropes. eHow was also noted as having one of the largest collections of tutorials on the web in, “How to Guide: 60+ Great How to Sites and Resources.” We hope that the eHow community continues to inspire each other and produce quality content to maintain our great word of mouth.
The eHow staff started off the