In my constant quest to make sure OUR sites are up-to-par, I am proud to have stumbled across (with the help of Angela) the new beta site for Black Enterprise magazine.

Black Enterprise had a brief article about it on the 15th of October stating their new site would launch today, October 27th. While I hope that is still the case, a quick look at the ‘hidden’ beta site suggest they have quite a laundry list of things to still work out.

Replete with a fresh and updated look, Black Enterprise (BE) beta is essentially a custom Wordpress installation with a custom theme and lots of plugins (more on this later). The open and white homepage embeds the requisite image and headline gallery (although I would have preferred jQuery instead of Flash), more expansive top category list, and ‘quick play’ introduction video in the middle page.

While I do like the new look, I am a little disappointed at the ‘below the fold’ issues as most of their meaty content violates a few usability best practices.

Included features also include a widgetbox.com widget for other sites to embed on their blog, a nice tabber feature highlighting the ‘most viewed’, ‘emailed’, and ‘commented upon’, and a nice highlight of their editors with links to their posts.

As a current Drupal junky, I am a little disappointed BE decided to use Wordpress as their content management system (CMS) as its main intention is a blogging platform. While I understand that it has been proven Wordpress can be shoe-horned into such implementations, the tons of additional javascript additions each plugin adds in addition to the lack of real community features, I hope they don’t run into any scalability issues nor do they make too many changes to the core code as any update will wipe them away.

All in all, I can’t wait to see the new features for their new site!