Changes and More Changes

We’re making changes here at the Insurance Journal. Changes that make our print magazines and Web site ever more useful and valuable to you. The traffic on our Web site,
www.insurancejournal.com, continues to amaze me. For August, we recorded 15.9 million hits, 1.2 million page views, 297,000 visits and more than 65,000 unique users! Our Web site has transformed the Insurance Journal from a publisher of regional magazines to the biggest supplier of information to the insurance industry, nationally and internationally. While these statistics are amazing, I’m surprised by some people that tell me they think that everything in the print magazines is on the site. This isn’t the case at all. There is overlap, but a great deal of information in print isn’t on our site and the same is true for the site content.

Which leads me to our first piece of news: we have redesigned our site to be easier to use. Also, our site visitors can more easily see what is in print that they may want to read and be able to buy a copy online. Josh Carlson, our Web master and resident Internet guru has done a terrific job. Our site content is now being served from a database, which allows for quicker updates and improves searchability of articles. Two among many advantages to a solution. The new design allows faster loading and makes it easier for you to print articles and e-mail stories to your friends

Another phenomenon that surprises me, is that many people download the entire copy of each print issue and read it after they’ve printed it; cover, ads, contents and all. In fact about 8,000 copies per month are downloaded. So when you’re on our Web site, take a moment and look around at all the changes we’ve made. I would like your comments, good and bad.

Our next piece of news is that the Insurance Journal has acquired the Claims Guides. The Claims Guides are annual directories that provide resource information for carrier staff adjusters, independent adjusters, risk managers and agents. We will publish 37 regional directories beginning in December of this year. Katie Robley, an 11-year veteran of the Insurance Journal, has been named publisher of the Claims Guides. If you want to congratulate her, call her at (800)-897-9965, ext. 116 or send her an e-mail at krobley@insurancejournal.com. Katie is busy planning the first issues to be published under her management and working on a redesign of the Claims Guides Web site. All part of our plan to be the best and biggest supplier of information to the property/casualty insurance industry.

And last but not least, we are adding pages to our print issues to bring you more useful information. In each edition we will publish at least one agency management article to help you run your agency better. We’re adding a new section on employee benefits and starting to profile people and firms that we think are unique—people and firms that have accomplished something or achieved something that you can benefit from by knowing about or even emulating their strategy.