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If you’re reading this, you’ve almost certainly already noticed something different.

On Tuesday, Metal Center News completed its first website redesign in almost a decade. It was long overdue.

We believe the new site will be everything a trade magazine’s web presence should be – current, relevant and easily navigable. Our goal is for the site to serve as a true complement to the printed product of Metal Center News. That begins with today’s relaunch, but also calls upon us to update it daily.

Associate Editor Jonathan Samples, who joined us last summer, brings ample digital experience to our company, and he has been crucial in the website’s development. He’ll also help develop more active social media feeds, alerting followers to breaking news and engaging readers on the topics in the metals industry. I encourage you to take the steps necessary to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, to help deliver the news to you, rather than hoping you simply stop on by.

Unlike how we used our old site, we’re going to truly take advantage of what the Internet can offer, particularly those ways where it differentiates from print. The web offers the room to go into greater details in some of our features, or to highlight a niche area that’s ripe for further exploration but didn’t fit in the limited space of the printed version. We’ve already sampled that some with MCN Extra over the past several months. Now, we’ll embrace that capability even more.

Another feature of the website is immediacy, the ability to deliver the news affecting the manufacturing industry as it develops, rather than the unavoidable time lapse you find with a printed product. We hope metalcenternews.com becomes a place where service center executives go first for the latest industry news, particularly those developments that are directly related to metals distribution.

Naturally, the shift isn’t just about our editorial department. The new site will allow our advertisers to reach our readers in previously unavailable ways. A featured video section will be prominently displayed, allowing equipment manufactures the ability to deliver company-produced content that highlights the attributes of their latest products. A second section for products by equipment type will also be highlighted.

I’m certain we’ll be spending some time in the next few weeks and months ironing out any of the kinks that weren’t discovered during the behind-the-scenes ramp-up phase. If you find anything that seems amiss, please feel free to contact me or anyone else on the staff at Metal Center News. We’ve invested heavily in this new site. We want it to serve your evolving needs for information most effectively.