We made the changes because you aren’t the same businesspeople you were during the housing crash a few years ago. Again and again last month, in the packed aisles at JLC Live in Providence, R.I., I heard remodelers eager to tackle several months’ worth of jobs—a backlog created by customer demand, not just the fiendish winter. You’re busier than ever, so when you turn to services such as REMODELING you deserve content that’s quick, compelling, and visual, and that traverses an array of subjects.
The new-look REMODELING created by our design team aims to do that in many ways. “Punch List,” the opening section, begins with timely reminders for the month and follows it with brief news alerts. “Your Business” continues our practice of combining news reports and experts’ advice through features like “How-To” and “Good Form,” but in a less formulaic format. As a result, we have increased freedom to produce more visually creative reports than in the past.
You can expect our feature section to carry on its tradition of award-winning reportage, the kind of work for which REMODELING last month won two prestigious Neal Awards for business-to-business journalism based on a pair of cover stories from 2013. Here is where you’ll continue to see mainstays such as the Big50, the Remodeling Design Awards, and the Remodeling 550, as well as enterprise pieces on technology, television, and The Next Big Things in remodeling. You’ve also told us that you value our products articles, so you can expect roughly a quarter of our coverage to be devoted to new products, how to use them, and who uses them.
Years ago, REMODELING executive editor Sal Alfano set a goal for this magazine: Show remodelers in the context of their work. Nowhere is this more true than in our design articles. Mainstays such as “Before + After,” “Kitchen + Bath,” and the home performance section will continue striving to display your imagination at work. We’ve also added a back-page feature, “You Built It,” heralding out-of-the-ordinary examples of beautiful things you and your teams have done.
Good design helps encourage such activity on the website. I’m betting the work on the magazine will prove to be similarly inviting.