Hi all,

I made quite a few changes to the site and wanted to not only explain my reasonings but also get your feedback. I apologize in advance for any dead links, but I feel that these changes are needed. This site is starting to get noticed, and, based on your feedback and content of posts during our first 3 months, I wanted to reorg now before any more growth.

Polling Results

Based on the results of the last poll, most of you (both newbies and veterans) come to this site for the technical content and not certifications. Many have told me off site that they feel it is important to still have the cert information, but make those conversations an optional part of the bigger topic, not the whole topic itself. Point taken.

  BTW - I was disappointed by the poll results showing that not many poeple want to share their experiences. I'm keeping hope alive by thinking that sharing was most people's second choice. I'm fond of telling those outside of IT that this industry has a natural tendancy to educate and share. Don't let me down!

Certifications Tab

It was also brought to my attention that, for those who do value certs, I was missing a few. So, as part of the magazine side (as opposed to the forum side), I made significant changes to the Certifications Tab. First of all, I added some certs. Since more certs exist and many more are sure to come, listing them all one by one in the sub-menu was not a wise use of space. Therefore, my next step was to categorized them into Hacking, Forensics, Incident Response, and then All Other Security Certs (this still points to our sister site CSP Mag).

Doing it this way not only allows for growth of additional cert listings, but it also allows me to turn on the cross reference features for each cert. Now you can see Related Topics and Related Forum Posts for every credential.

Forum Reorganization

Changing the organization of the certs tab forced me to changed the forum categories. This also has the benefit of giving viewers the focus on the broader subject (not specifically certs) that they were looking to have. We now have genral discussions on the 'topics' of Hacking, Forensics, etc. without having to talk specifically about certification. This new layout allows for discussion of both in the same area.

Your Feedback

OK... let me have it. What do you think about the changes?

Don