A specialist business website continues its expansion with the launch of two new sections.

TheBusinessDesk.com has brought in new sections on its website for stories about the manufacturing sector and creative and media industries.

It comes after the online news provider introduced a constantly-updated shares and markets service earlier this month – claiming to be the first regional business media organisation to do so.

Former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves, who is the website’s West Midlands editor, said: “It’s always been our intention to create a manufacturing section when we launched in this region.

“Manufacturing truly is the lifeblood of the economy in the West Midlands and this new channel gives us a single place where we can bring together our coverage of this vital sector.

“Similarly, it quickly became clear after we launched in February that the creative industries in the region also deserved their own section on the website.”

TheBusinessDesk.com was launched in Yorkshire in 2007, with the West Midlands part of the site launching in February this year. It also covers the North West region and has 48,000 registered users in total.

Comments

Confused (24/08/2010 11:08:27)
48,000 registered users doesn’t mean much if everyone else measures their performance by monthly unique visitors or page impressions. Perhaps the publicity hungry Mr Reeves would like to share those?

Colin Osborne (24/08/2010 14:05:17)
Although technically in the West Mids, I’m out in the sticks, find TheBusinessDesk.com an informative site, and will welcome the additions of the two new sections. I’m not sure I understand Confused’s references to ‘monthly unique visitors’ and ‘page impressions’, but living within the shadow of the Longmynd I’m sure I’d be glad to see the former – though once a month would probably be sufficient. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee ‘the publicity-hungry Mr Reeves’ (note the hyphen) would be willing to share them.

Marc ‘publicity-hungry’ Reeves (25/08/2010 09:01:21)
Thanks for the comments. First, to publicity-shy ‘Confused’, who suggests registered users are meaningless if unique user numbers is the currency of choice for other sites – I think there’s a trend away from playing the pure numbers game advocated by Google. CPM (price per 1,000 clicks) is a measure that undermines the true value of the kind of readers advertisers want to reach. The number of unique users alone tells you nothing about who the visitors are, but if you know those users have also gone through a process of signing up to a site, you can make fair assumptions about their level of engagement. We know that’s as important to our advertising partners as the pure numbers themselves – which, by the way, currently stand at 77,000 unique monthly users across our three regions – and growing.
Colin: glad you find the service useful (and did you see Tamlyn’s piece on the Shropshire Jelly meetup last week?)