At the start of February 2001, PLASA’s brand new website went online at www.plasa.org. The new site, developed over the past three months, represents the latest phase of PLASA’s online presence and continues the organisation’s aim to provide the premier online resource for the entertainment, presentation, event and installation technology industry worldwide.
The new site has been re-designed and re-built from the ground up, taking into account the changing face of PLASA as a diverse organisation, encompassing the trade association, the leading trade show, a successful publishing division, a busy technical standards office, and a wealth of industry-related information resources.
The greater part of the site remains committed to providing useful information, free of charge, to the industry as a whole - including full and comprehensive details of PLASA members, all the latest industry news, information on a wide range of industry events, forthcoming events and industry-related training courses. What’s more, the new site has taken the provision of these resources a step further with the addition of custom-programmed, fully-searchable databases allowing fast, easy and flexible access to the full listing of 450+ PLASA members, more than 1,500 industry news items in the online news archive, a comprehensive calendar of industry events and over 100 titles in PLASA’s Technical Book Service.
This ability to search by key words makes the new website extraordinarily powerful - visitors to www.plasa.org will get answers to their questions quickly and effortlessly. For instance, you can find which member companies offer a particular product or service, locate news items of specific interest to you or check the dates and venue of a major trade show. PLASA has also taken advantage of the latest developments in WAP technology allowing those with WAP phones to also access information on the site. Users can look at the day’s news headlines, find a PLASA Member or locate details of an event.
The new site also promotes the PLASA membership to a rapidly-increasing worldwide audience of industry professionals. Figures for 2000 show that the previous PLASA website received around 1.2 million page requests during the year - representing a 50% increase on the figure for 1999. It is expected that the launch of the new PLASA website, with its enhanced information facilities, will further increase this figure for 2001, making www.plasa.org a major reference point for the global industry.
