Florida Trend | Florida's Business Authority

The New FloridaTrend.com

On Jan. 30, Florida Trend goes live with our redesigned website. If you’re one of the 100,000-plus visitors who click on FloridaTrend.com each month, let me assure you it will be a totally new online experience. If you’ve never visited the site, now’s the time to do so.

Our home page has a whole new look. It’s clean, crisp, appealing and, most importantly, it’s intelligent. You’ll easily access articles, data and infographics from Florida Trend and also from our annual and special publications, including Florida Small Business, our authoritative guide to starting and operating a small business, and Business Florida, a tool for business recruitment.

For searching and researching Florida topics, you won’t find a better site or search engine. With Florida Trend article archives dating back to 2000, the site is the place you’ll want to go for information on the issues, people, places and ideas that define Florida. Full access to the site is free, and registration is quick and easy.

Our interactive Restaurant Guide, Executive Market Place classified ads and a statewide calendar of events are just a few of the site’s other new features. You can also sign up for free daily and monthly e-newsletters delivered to your inbox. You’ll be hearing more about these in the months to come.

For our advertisers, the new site offers an exceptionally cost-effective way to reach top prospects who are different from our print subscribers in several ways. A survey of our registered site users last year shows that only four in 10 are subscribers to the print magazine. We also found that our online audience is younger, and more of them are female (44%) than our print subscribers. And they split fairly evenly among managers/administrators, executives and professionals. Like Florida Trend print subscribers, our web users are affluent and well-educated, with $215,300 average household income and $841,000 average value of personal assets. Eight in 10 are college grads; four in 10 have post-graduate education.


Online publishing staff (from left): Tim Meyer, online editor; and Otelo Vizcaino and Joyce Edmondson, online project managers.

The new FloridaTrend.com design is the work of Otelo Vizcaino, who came on as our first full-time online publishing staffer last March. With a bachelor’s in digital art and technology and degrees in computer graphics and interactive media, Otelo worked with Flex360, our site development firm, to accomplish all of our objectives for the new site and turn them into a great user experience.

Joyce Edmondson joined the staff in October bringing with her 20 years of experience at the St. Petersburg Times working on major print and online projects. Tim Meyer, a part of Florida Trend’s editorial staff since 1995, is now working as online editor. Tim will be putting together the new Daily Pulse section on the site — a summary of what you need to know about Florida each day — and he also will be working with the editorial team on creating web-exclusive content.

We think our new website will be an indispensable gateway to Florida for anyone who wants to know and understand the fast-growing state that the rest of the country knows it has to watch. Just as we are constantly fine-tuning our magazine, we’re doing the same to improve our website. Go online and see what we mean.