By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady
BLR founder and CEO Bob Brady invites you to “test drive” the new and improved Compensation.BLR.com website.
Making life easier for our readers
Almost 3 years ago, we made a breakthrough discovery that led to the complete redesign of our flagship website, HR.BLR.com. The original site was our first major foray into Web publishing and, while we were happy with it, it had some major limitations.
First of all, it was hard—too hard—to find some of the thousands of files on the site. Some of the menus were tedious and the navigation was, at times, obscure. Second, one our main benefits—the comparison of national and state law—was difficult to use because of cumbersome shifting back and forth between different Web pages.
Compensation.BLR.com, now thoroughly revamped with easier navigation and more complete compensation information, will tell you what’s being paid right in your state—or even metropolitan area—for hundreds of jobs. Try it at no cost and get a complimentary special report. Read more.
Among dozens of other improvements, HR.BLR.com 3.0 introduced a “drill down” to make it easier to find files and “side-by-side” state/federal analysis to allow easier comparisons. It took almost a year and half to go from concept to delivery of the new website, but it was well worth the wait.
We’d been worried that subscribers might find the switch of designs confusing and frustrating, but the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. We didn’t get everything perfect, but through “usability studies,” focus groups, and intense teamwork the redesign eliminated a lot of problems by making the encyclopedic information available on the site much more accessible. Kim Ryan, project manager, and Web developers—including Matt Kornguth, Glenn Seseske, and Eric Swanson—did a fabulous job.
In the year and a half since then, we’ve gone back to our major websites, Safety.BLR.com and Enviro.BLR.com and redesigned them in the same style. And I’m now happy to announce that we just finished the last of the sites, Compensation.BLR.com. The switchover to the new release took place on May 9. I’m writing this column to invite all readers to “test drive” the new and improved site. You can use all of the site’s features for 2 weeks with no cost or obligation.
Improvements
As we’ve gone from site to site, we’ve been able to fix mistakes and introduce additional features. For example, a key feature is our “sortable list” of all the resources available on a given subject, from PowerPoint® presentations to checklists, analyses, news articles, etc.
In the first release, I (in my wisdom) insisted, against the advice of all of the developers, that the list could only be “filtered” through a menu of tabs. Everyone else on the team wanted a “pull-down list,” but I invoked my authority. Guess what? They were right. Tabs limit you to just a few items and users want more. That is one of the improvements on the new, revised site. (And I’m happy enough to learn from my mistake; however, as I proudly showed this to one of our salespeople, Dave Cook, he said, “But I loved showing the tabs to prospects.” Sorry, Dave!)
Other improvements include:
- Side-by-side state and federal analysis. Version 3.0 puts state and federal regulatory analysis side by side, making differences easy to understand.
- Lists of resources. Our lists make it easy to find any and every resource available on the topic you’re searching. If you want to do training on, say, performance appraisals, go to that topic, and you see everything available, from audio PowerPoints to regulatory analysis.
- Navigation by “drill down.” Say you are researching a problem relating to overtime exemptions for inside salespeople. You can easily see that the “category” is Compensation and the “topic” is Exempt Employees. One click and you get a clear, complete explanation of both state and federal law.
Try BLR’s all-in-one compensation website, Compensation.BLR.com, and get a complimentary special report, Top 100 FLSA Overtime Q&As, no matter what you decide. Find out more.
Job descriptions and salary data
The Job Description Manager has been added to the site. It has customizable job descriptions for more than 2,400 jobs that are tied to comprehensive salary data, showing wages and salaries by geographic area, size of organization, and industry.
Take a look
Come see for yourself with a no-obligation trial of Compensation.BLR.com. Our staff—led by Kim Ryan and including Matt Kornguth, Glenn Seseske, Mark Bonano, and Eric Swanson—have done a great job, once again.
And I’d love to get any feedback you have, Rbrady@blr.com