I started at Questex Media in December of 2006. I was really excited to get back into publishing, as it had been about 4 years since I left Penton Media. Initially I reported to the VP of Digital Media, until a Director of Digital Operations could be hired, which wouldn’t happen until March the next year.
The Environment
At that time Questex, which was headquartered in Newton Massachusetts, had offices in multiple locations including Duluth, Minnesota, Cleveland, Ohio, San Diego, California, just to name a few. They had over 90 publications and had recently been spun off of a larger company called Advanstar. At the time I started, all of our sites were hosted on Advanstar’s proprietary content management system (CMS).
The CMS
This system was JSP (Java Server Pages) based. Although I wouldn’t have a hand in the JSP programming, having worked in my previous job in an ASP (Active Server Pages) and having earlier worked in helping build a JSP based system came in handy in understanding things. I started out working in the existing CMS and it took until April 2008 before we would transfer over to Drupal, a popular open-source platform.
This gave me a lot of time to get into the current CMS, which allowed me to gain an understanding of how the data interrelated. Which would come in handy later on.
Other Projects
In the time between my starting and the development work required in the switchover (get more info on development times). I worked on smaller projects and operational work, for example, newsletter redesigns, routine newsletter deployment, attending to site fixes (for example the ordering of articles) and minor upgrades (for example adding a flash component), special promotions, the routine process of making and sending a specification excel document to tell production what articles to pull from the magazine Quark/Indesign files and send to India for processing in XML, then upload to the site, then etc.
Changes
After the Director of Digital Operations was hired, he asked me to learn Jira (Agile project management software) and become the Administrator. Different office locations focused on different publications. In the New York office the divisions were the Hotel & Travel group and the Beauty Group (each had associated trade shows as well). Each location had their own digital staff and the larger overall plan was to bring these separate groups together to share resources. Jira would be a key compoment of that plan. Transition of the sites over to Drupal would begin with the publication Travel Agent Central, which was one of Questex’s flagship publications.
The company selected to do the development was Infobeans, located in Pune India.
Since I had the time to get familiar with the current site, I was able create an entity-relationship diagram for the developers, which helped in the transition. I worked closely with marketing, editorial, external designers, and the developers at Infobeans.
After Travel Agent Central was transitioned to Drupal, I then did the same process (although much more streamlined), with other publications such as Luxury Travel Advisor, Home-Based Travel Agent, American Salon, and American Spa.
The learning experience with Travel Agent’s Transition was replicated across the organization by the other publications.
Here are some of the sites I worked on (note that these may have changed quite a bit, since its been over 5 years):
- https://www.americansalon.com/
- https://www.americanspa.com/
- https://www.hotelmanagement.net/
- https://www.travelagentcentral.com/
- https://www.luxurytraveladvisor.com/
At some point I was also asked to build and maintain WordPress blogs. This was to provide back links to the site, a tactic that no longer works with Google. But it did get me experience with WordPress, which would be helpful in getting a position at my next job with the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids.
Around 2011 I was promoted to Web Project Manager. This was someone academic since I had been managing projects , such as site updates, which involved the developers at InfoBeans and external designers.
Probably the most important lesson was that people, even those in higher levels of management aren’t entirely clear on the difference between a product manager and a product manager, as well as a product and a project.
During my time at Questex I witnessed many changes. Both the VP and the Director of digital operations left the company and the department that brought all the various web producers together was disbanded. I was then to report to someone from one of the companies that Questex had purchased. This wasn’t such a bad thing either since she was a really good boss.
However, I could see that publishing, especially publishing companies that came out of traditional media were under serious stress. When I saw a chance to work at the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, a NYC-based non-profit, I jumped at the chance.