Since the publication of its first edition in 1993, the Electronics Buyers’ Guide (EBG) has served as a faithful companion to Dataweek, keeping it close company on many a South African electronic engineer’s desk.
While the latter serves the purpose of giving readers frequent, up-to-date news, technical articles, practical advice and opinions, EBG provides an annually updated reference source to the multitude of hardware, software and services available, as well as where to get them – the ‘who’s who’ to Dataweek’s ‘what’s what’.
When we launched our websites in 1997, we immediately seized upon the potential of one of the biggest benefits the Internet could provide: searchability. As such, we integrated search functionality into our websites from the word go, which comes in handy seeing as our online vault now houses almost 23 000 web pages on Dataweek and roughly 4250 brands across 3900 product/service types, available from a total of 460 listed suppliers, on EBG.
We have given our sites a fresh coat of paint from time to time to keep them looking fresh, and keeping our web development in-house has given us the agility to swiftly add new content categories as they become relevant, and to enhance functionality to stay ahead of the curve. Having given careful consideration to the trends characterising the use of the Internet – as a work tool specifically – in 2014, we identified ease of access to information as probably the single biggest evolutionary factor since the Internet’s early years.
As such, we’ve come up with an even easier way for readers to tap into our online repository. Thanks to tighter, more organic integration between the two, every page on the Dataweek site now has a direct connection to related products and services on the EBG site, via one or more unobtrusive links embedded in the navigation bar towards the top of the page. These links are logically related to the page you’re on, so if you’re reading an article about a new microcontroller, for example, you’ll now be able to link directly to a page that will then allow you to narrow your search according to the features you require, before producing a list of all the South African companies that supply the type of microcontroller you’re looking for. Clicking on one of these suppliers’ names will then reveal their contact details.
This integration works both ways, so if you’re browsing a category on EBG you’ll be provided with links to related Dataweek content. What’s more, when viewing a particular company’s details on EBG, a list of recent Dataweek articles from that company will appear. In fact, you won’t find a single page on either site without a link to the other, and colour coding is applied consistently throughout both to provide visual cues. We believe this level of integration between news content and supplier info is unprecedented, and we hope you find it helps to reduce the number of mouse clicks needed to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Two modern trends we decided emphatically to not implement are apps and paywalls. We feel strongly that device-specific apps add an unnecessary complication for both us as a publisher and for you as a reader. Seeing as web browsers are constantly evolving and are optimised for exactly the type of content we provide, we’ve decided to stick with the old school approach on this one. Much effort is put in by our technical team to ensure compatibility across all modern Internet-enabled devices, regardless of manufacturer, and when visiting our sites from a mobile device such as a smartphone, a specially formatted version is displayed to make browsing more comfortable.
Regardless of what or where you’re browsing from, all online Dataweek and EBG content continues to be made available at no cost and requiring no registration. As always, they can be accessed by navigating to www.dataweek.co.za and www.ebg.co.za, respectively.
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