Steel Products

Final Thoughts

Written by John Packard

August 12, 2013

By John Packard

Steel Market Update wants to welcome our newest member to our team: Ryan Packard. Ryan is joining us after completion of his Masters at McGill and moving to Chicago. I don’t expect my son to take over the company anytime soon as his expertise is as a percussionist and Chicago is where he has chosen to make his mark. Fortunately, SMU has a need as we bring up our new website in the sales, marketing and other areas of the company on a part-time basis until his career takes off. So, don’t be surprised if he contacts you in the weeks ahead either working on a special project for me or in his sales capacity.  Ryan’s email address will be: Ryan@SteelMarketUpdate.com.

When I started the discussions to build a new website almost two years ago I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into (other than it was going to be expensive). A new website is like having a new toy – one with lots of pieces – and as the toy starts coming into view you realize you are missing a piece here or, if you had only thought of this and now you want to add it to the project.

I thought we would have it up and running by the middle of August.  We aren’t going to make that deadline.  Now the goal is the first of September.

Last week we spent most of the week learning how to create our newsletters (plural), how we were going to notify our customers that a newsletter was available to be read, how to integrate everything into our website and then tweak the few issues which came up during the process.

One of the goals of the website is to provide multiple ways for our members to interact both with the news and data. Like a spider web everything is tied together.

This week we should begin testing the subscription systems and begin sending out to a very small group our first newsletters. We also have a number of pages yet to produce and put into the website.

We are getting close to the finish line – which makes the process even more time consuming and frustrating for all of us at SMU.

Thank you again for your business. Your support has allowed us the opportunity to build our third website in 5 years and to continue to grow.  Your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard

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