Editorial: April 2015

If you use a mobile device to visit our site (as about a quarter of our visitors do) you will see the biggest difference. Gone is the tiny version of our desktop site with miniscule print and links too small to tap. The new version is a true mobile-friendly site with headlines arranged vertically for easy scrolling on a phone or tablet. If you have tried to visit canadianrentalservice.com on a mobile device before and been discouraged, I encourage you to try again.

The experience on a desktop will benefit from our new “everything up front” layout that puts more of the content on the home page rather than buried behind links and menus. It’s friendlier for someone who just wants to browse to see what is new and to be able to choose from a big selection of articles, news items, opinion columns and other content without necessarily being exactly sure of what they are looking for. If you are looking for something specific, the new search engine is much improved. There is also a large archive of video, instead of just one featured box.

Another major upgrade has been to the way our rental product information is organized. You can now choose from Construction, Landscaping, Homeowner and Party and Event categories and see listings of product subcategories underneath them. From there, it is easy to select a subcategory and browse the new product releases submitted by our suppliers. It is a fast and easy way to get a sense of what is new and available.

The boundaries between digital and print media are breaking down. No, that is not just Information Age communications theory woo – it actually means something specific. It means that where a print magazine might once have been viewed as something different and distinct from the online channels, with a different function and different content, it is now becoming more and more part of an integrated communications strategy where a message is put across in several different ways so that readers can absorb it however and wherever they wish. The goal of our website is to give you everything you might get from reading the print edition, plus enhanced access to all the information resources of the Internet, plus access to the interactivity of social media.

I hope our site will become a regular drop-in for you when you have a spare moment or two. Please send me your feedback and suggestions – we want to make canadianrentalservice.com your online home for rental industry business information.

Show season has come to an end for another year. I attended the Atlantic, Ontario and Saskatoon shows personally this year, and got reports on The Rental Show, Quebexpo and B.C. from others. There were a few takeaways, but I’ll hold on to my observations and share them in a special digital show wrap-up edition that we will be producing for the first time this April. We will be packaging up all our coverage of the Canadian shows and The Rental Show into one digital edition (similar to the familiar digital edition of the print magazine) that will give us some added opportunities to include more photos and videos. Watch for that coming out in April and let us know what you think.