GW&D now owns the industry's largest interactive Internet forum

Editor-in-Chief
Bruce Vernyi
E-mail: bvernyi@penton.com

If you haven't visited our web site in the last few weeks, you may have missed the news that Penton Media acquired WeldingWeb.com (www.weldingweb.com), an online community and discussion forum.

WeldingWeb.com is being integrated with our Weldingdesign.com (www.weldingdesign.com) web site, and this community forum will add a key interactive component to what we are making available.

Our web site includes articles, columns and technical information drawn from both Gases & Welding Distributor-and Welding Design & Fabrication magazines, and the addition of WeldingWeb.com adds more than 7,000 registered members who make up a strong and active welding community.

One of the advantages of having this active community is that now there is one place to go for extensive technical and product information, advice on welding problems, market interaction and social interaction.

What this means for distributors is that we now own one of the most energetic sites on the Internet where welders meet and talk about the problems and challenges they face. WeldingWeb.com gives you a chance to meet and to know your customers away from the sales call, and in a more personable and relaxed setting. I want to invite you to take a look at the site, register for it, and become an active part of it.

We now have the opportunities to support and enhance that site with the products we offer, so you will see our presence there immediately.

The WeldingWeb.com site has something for just about anyone, from welding shop owners and the serious professional welder to the hobbyist. And, if you just want to socialize with like-minded people in the industry, you can get on and post messages as long as you want.

Purchasing this lively web site and making it a part of the package that we offer is one more step in our effort to provide friction-free dialogue for our welding community using a variety of methods.

Our magazine -- and the information we provide in print -- will be more visible and, through the affiliation with the magazine, we will be able to attract new members to the on-line community and further enhance its status as the leading on-line community for welding professionals.

We are delivering ways to get new and important information about our industry to you, to keep our community strong and growing.

In another investment that we are making in this industry, Gases and Welding Distributor magazine is about to launch a two-part research program for gas and welding equipment distributors by which we plan to establish benchmarks that distributors can use to measure and improve their operations.

In the next issue of this magazine, you'll find a pullout survey form that asks for specific operating information about your business. It shouldn't take very long to fill out, and it's completely anonymous. We will compile the data to provide you a provide a tool that you can use to determine how your operations stack up against other distributors, and where you might have to focus to make improvements.

We will tell you more about this benchmarking tool in our next issue, when we ask you to fill out the survey, so please be ready to spend some time on it.