Singapore - Rednano.sg, Singapore's home-grown search and directory engine, marks its first year with a re-design of its website and the roll-out of a new advertising network.

From 18 March onwards, users of rednano.sg will be greeted by a new home page when they visit www.rednano.sg. Icons of each section are now on the front page, allowing users to jump straight to them if they prefer to see the specific content there. And the front pages of most of the individual sections also show visitors exactly what the popular searches are for those sections, putting those search items just a click away. The re-design also draws users' attention to rednano.sg's special offerings, such as the past news stories from the extensive archives of parent company Singapore Press Holdings' 17 newspaper titles.

Mr Paul Jansen, CEO of SPH Search, the company behind Rednano.sg, said, "The changes were made with the feedback from users and advertisers over the past year in mind. The content, particularly the Directory, is better highlighted and more easily accessible. And there are considerably more options for advertisers to catch users' attention and service their needs."

Mr Jansen said: "While we were attracting business from the "long tail" group of firms for our Directory and other sections, advertisers and media agencies were also telling us that they were looking for a premium network of websites they could use for their search marketing needs.

"What they wanted, was an advertising network which had visitors they knew were in their target group. And that is what the Rednano AdSMART Network is about: a collection of sites whose owners are being invited to join as they have quality audiences with appeal to advertisers.

"This network will be of great benefit to those with branding messages who had previously been restricted to just online banner advertising in a few quality sites. Now they can also reach clearly defined quality audiences with search marketing keyword purchases, which is demonstrating worldwide a high return on investment."

As part of its anniversary celebration, rednano.sg launched a special "Rednano Anniversary Package" to help advertisers reach out to more online customers. For just $7 a day, advertisers can enhance their company listings with logos, branches, website addresses, a "Click-to-Call service", among others. For instance, the "Click to Call" feature enables online users to reach the advertiser at just a click of the mouse whenever they use rednano.sg.

The local search and directory is looking at introducing more value-add advertising packages to help local companies cope with the economic downturn. Said Mr Johnson Goh, Vice President Marketing and Sales, "As A&P budget gets cut across many industries, we want to do our part to the long tail business community by giving advertisers more reasons to retain their marketing visibility in down times."

Traffic to rednano.sg has been growing rapidly. The team behind rednano.sg is equally proud of the awards it has garnered since its launch on March 18, 2008.Among the accolades are the regional Innovative Online Achievement 2008 from AdAsia and the international Digital Market Award 2009 from FAST Search and Transfer.

Other significant milestones for the engine included the launch of its mobile services via SMS 33333, WAP (mobile.rednano.sg) and a location-based search Rednano LOCATE, besides the online search portal www.rednano.sg.