Today, the mother of five sings with the Colorado Light Opera and works as a career coach, lecturer, and writer in Boulder, Colo. In addition to penning her regular Liz Ryan: The Workplace column for BusinessWeek.com, she contributes to the user-generated site Glassdoor.com, which features insider info—including salary figures—on 30,000 companies, and provides workplace commentary for BBC Radio.

Liz's best advice for job hunters today? "Whether you're a CEO or a receptionist, you need to stop saying 'I have' and start saying 'I know how,'" she explains. "Instead of talking about how many years of experience you have in T&E, tell them, 'I love being a sleuth and I know how to ferret out excess spending.' That's the beginning of building your own personal brand as a job candidate."

Liz not only answers readers' questions but also frequently responds to comments. I encourage you to email Liz with your own career-related question for an upcoming column. And thanks for contributing to BusinessWeek.com, Liz—we're singing your praises.

BusinessWeek reader Rom Mattesich posted a story idea on this blog to alert us, and his fellow readers, to an issue that was hindering his family-run business. Rom, a retired telecom engineer, helps run his wife’s general contracting business, Avant Construction. Avant has withstood the downturn in South Florida's real estate/construction business through cost-cutting measures that included jettisoning its website to, as Rom puts it, "hitch a ride" on Microsoft's Office Live, Small Business.

As Rom and his wife discovered, moving their company's website and employee email accounts to a free, Web-based service can have a downside. Some business email addresses that were accidentally deleted couldn't be restored for 130 days as a security measure, even though they own the email addresses' domain name. "This is likely to be the case of many other small businesses," he told us. "The loss of our main emails is really hurting my business. We need to fully control the addition/deletion of email accounts."

His situation inspired BW senior technology writer Arik Hesseldahl to write a broader story, Web-Based E-Mail: Businesses Beware. A follow-up story by our senior tech writer Olga Kharif, Perils of the Mobile Cloud, dove deeper into the potential hazards of storing personal and business data with online services.

While we couldn't restore Avant's missing email accounts, Rom says it was a lesson learned the hard way. At least, he reports, "Business is beginning to brighten up, but it has been a rough couple of years." Best of luck, Rom, and thanks for helping us alert other readers whose businesses may take an unintended wild ride on the Web.

Calvin Lee, a BusinessWeek reader in Singapore, is watching a different development in Washington: the Obama Administration's move to allocate $1 billion to spurring innovation, including technology that would boost his industry of translation services. Thank you, Calvin, for posting your comment on this blog, which inspired BW innovation writer Damian Joseph to write this story.

I invite you to check out Jessie's story, A Grand Goal for More U.S. Manufacturing Jobs, and thank you, Rob for taking time to stop by our digital newsroom and pitching us on a subject that's top of his mind, and many Americans' minds these days. Rob, you also may want to check out Pete Engardio's story on U.S. manufacturing: Can the Future Be Built in America? Love to hear your thoughts!

By 2000, the number was down to 16%. City leaders, however, were prepared. For the past 20 years, Chattanooga has been tearing down its industrial downtown – replacing vacant lots with parks, warehouses with museums and factories with open-air markets. Private development has followed, Chattanooga is growing in population, and the city is one of only three in the U.S. to increase downtown jobs between 1998 and 2006.

Not incidentally, the hospitality and tourism industries exploded over the past decade. The sector saw 17.5% growth between 2001 and 2005 just as primary metal manufacturing shrank by 70%. Two decades of executing private-public projects such as brownfield remediation and highway redevelopment added infrastructure skills that aided Chattanooga in attracting a big player from the manufacturing industry too. Talk about full circle. Read RJ's story and find out who what international car company will start making sedans in Chattanooga by 2011.

And, keep the ideas coming!

"Wiring Rural America: Which Technology is Best?" is part of her report and was inspired by BusinessWeek reader David Hanna, a managing partner of Prudential SourceOne Realty in Chicago and 2009 president of the Chicago Association of REALTORS. Thank you, David!

James Gregware, the CEO of ProRezOnline, a marketing firm and resume-building Web site, inspired reporter David Bogoslaw to delve into the evolving human resources business. Some companies are moving from generic, keyword-centric hiring practices to customized search and hire missions. The results? Lower costs, less turnover and fewer advertisements. Find out the whole story at "This is Not Your Father's HR."

Gregware's response to the story? "The HR angle has been explored. Now, an angle from those unemployed might just start a dialog which could benefit everyone." Thank you, James, we appreciate your ideas and feedback.

On the lighter side of life, Debate Room Editor Rebecca Reisner penned a story called “Reality TV Reruns: Don’t Vote Them Off.” Inspired by young BusinessWeek reader Kyle Connor, Reisner uncovers – not surprisingly, perhaps – that it’s difficult to profit off shows like Survivor after the winners have already been declared. Find out why cooking competitions like Iron Chef have more of a shelf life and how TV producers are relying on video snacks to give viewers their fill.

Keep those ideas coming.

Bobdar, a Wharton graduate student in the MBA for Executives Program alerted staff writer Alison Damast to business schools’ new interest in a younger crop of future leaders.

Carol Klimas, whose husband is dealing with a case of small-biz identity theft in Phoenix, Ariz., asked us to look into a growing problem that only California seems to be directly addressing.

Staff writer Doug MacMillan went outside his beat to report on a New York City councilman’s initiative to keep public schools and fast food parlors apart. BW reader Geetha Thurairajah, a Canadian undergraduate who’s passionate about health and sustainability, inspired the story and is a journalist herself.

Albuquerque, N.M.-based writer Penny Rudolph asked us to figure out the story behind credit card companies' suddenly stringent lending rules. Reporter Prashant Gopal found out it’s a case of once bitten, once scared for major banks that have experience record credit car defaults recently.

Thanks, and keep those ideas coming!

A big congratulations to BusinessWeek reader Alton Drew. This past Monday – June 22 – Drew joined economics professor Peter Morici on CNBC Reports to discuss President Obama’s proposal to increase regulation of industrial lending companies. Drew says a CNBC producer contacted him after she read his Feb. 18 MyTake guest column for us, “Banks ‘Too Big to Fail’? Wrong.” His opinion piece landed Alton atop our most-read story list in mid-February and, it turns out, on national television. Drew, an Atlanta-based law professor and policy analyst, hasn’t wavered in his critique of government intervention – whether it be winter bailouts or summer regulation.

Alton’s journey from our Debate Room to the CNBC green room exemplifies what I like to call “the mobile comment.” At BusinessWeek.com, we don’t expect comments to be two-dimensional, sedentary objects. They get batted around or propelled by other commenters, promoted through In Your Face and sourced as inspiration for our reporters' stories. Our reader comments have a long tail, and in the case of Drew, one that caught the attention of Debate Room editor Rebecca Reisner (who asked him if he'd be interested in writing a MyTake for us), our readers (who catapulted his story to most-read pole position) and CNBC’s producer, who invited him on the show.

For an opportunity to get your own mobile comment started, check out our Case for Optimism blog. We are building a reader slide show that highlights well-supported signs of economic optimism, and the six most compelling observations or insights will make it into BusinessWeek’s August double issue. You can also share any "uncommon indicators" of an economic turnaround you spot in your business or community by tweeting us by using the #bizoptimism hashtag on Twitter.

Today we debut a newly redesigned home page, the first in a series of major improvements to BusinessWeek.com that will roll out over the next few months. A full year in the making, our new look represents a massive effort to increase our usefulness to you, to make our site more vibrant and more focused on need-to-know breaking business news. We think this next generation home page makes for a fresher, more dynamic, more modern and less-cluttered appearance.

What hasn't changed is as important as what has: our commitment to the highest standards of journalism and our goal to create a site with the deepest and most meaningful engagement of its readers. We remain devoted to thorough reporting, analytical thinking, superb writing, and seriousness of purpose. Our journalism is fair and dispassionate, based on expertise and insight as well as access to business thought leaders and newsmakers. And we maintain our focus on improving the craft of journalism by both engaging and collaborating with our readers. To us, that last thought is far more than words on a computer screen. It's our purpose and our promise.

We started on this journey a year ago from a position of great strength, with the largest audience in our history. Today BusinessWeek.com has more than 50 million monthly page views and some 10 million unique visitors worldwide, up 24 percent in 2008. Our reader engagement index has shown a 31 percent increase in the past year, with a 50 percent rise in reader perspectives on stories and a 43 percent increase in reader insights on our blogs.

When deputy creative director David Sleight wrote the creative brief for this project in July of 2008, he noted the following objectives: To increase repeat visits to the homepage, to drive more traffic from the homepage to the rest of the site via improved navigation, to clearly communicate BusinessWeek.com offerings and special features through intelligent use of navigation and page layout, and to focus the homepage offering on our core audience of global business professionals and their destination mindset.

David worked with the New York-based design firm Behavior to meet these goals. Their ideas were informed by market research, focus groups, passionate discussion, and the collective gut of many stakeholders. The result is a design we think you'll like and enjoy.

Here's what is new and improved:

• Increased news and analysis on the most important breaking stories of the day in business. We hope this new emphasis on providing analysis and insight on the crucial up-to-the-minute stories will encourage you to come back to our site throughout the day.

• Expanded coverage of the stock markets around the world with more detailed data on the companies that are making news in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

• A Business Exchange window to see what our users are reading and how they're reacting to stories on more than 1,500 topics, from commercial space travel to Starbucks, from around the web.

• A video player to highlight the vast amount of video storytelling, commentary and interviews we do on a daily basis.

• A feature strip (we call it the belly band in-house, because it rests toward the middle of the home page) to promote our blogs, special reports, stock snapshots, multimedia, and reader engagement initiatives.

• A refined navigation bar at the top of the page that focuses on core business coverage from finance to management, more quickly allowing you to get to the information you want and need.

There's more to come in the following weeks. Within the next month, we'll launch two new mobile apps, one for the iPhone and another for the BlackBerry. By early fall, we'll have redesigned all our channel homepages for our core coverage, from technology to small business. And by year-end, we expect to debut new story pages with better user engagement and collaboration features. (Please post a comment and let us know what you'd like to see on that front.)

We hope you agree with us that these changes will vastly improve the user experience—your experience—on BusinessWeek.com and we look forward to your feedback here.

Enjoy!

"Trust is integral to every transaction and the foundation for business success. It drives the volume, velocity and value of every business transaction." BusinessWeek reader Alex Todd, the founder and CEO of Trust Enablement Strategies, wrote that mission statement for his firm. The Toronto-based management consultant also pitched us on a story idea related to his mantra. The result -- "How Can Companies Win Back Trust?" -- looks at how the recession and financial crisis have shaken shareholders' faith in corporate boards and management, and what companies can do about it. Read BW reporter Ben Steverman's story and let us know what you think in the comments. And thanks to Alex for taking time to suggest we look at how companies can take steps to regain the faith of their investors.

BusinessWeek reader T.S. Aditya Raghav is preparing to begin MBA studies at IESE in Spain this fall. Naturally, given the economy, he's a bit nervous. So he posted a suggestion on this blog asking that a BusinessWeek reporter look back to the last recession to see how MBA grads fared in that downturn.

Geoff Gloeckler, a reporter on our b-schools team, took up the assignment. The result -- "MBA Tales: Searching for Work in a Recession" -- looks at the job-hunting experiences of five MBA grads who graduated in a time of economic upheaval.

We appreciate yet another smart idea from one of our valued readers. Read the story to find out how an earlier group of MBA grads navigated a slumping economy, and post your own insights and advice to today's jittery MBA students in the comments.

Our latest reader-suggested story looks at Wal-Mart’s entry into the retail-clinic business. BusinessWeek reader David O’Reilly (@IntelliMedBlog on Twitter) recommended we look into how the big-box retailer is revolutionizing health care, but what writer Greg Spielberg found is that Wal-Mart is struggling somewhat in its effort to capture a slice of the growing retail-clinic industry. While Wal-Mart had planned on opening 400 in-store clinics by the end of this year, it has seen mixed success, and the present count is 31 in nine states. CVS and Walgreens, on the other hand, are increasing their market share in a business that’s drawing increased attention nationwide. Thanks to David for suggesting and Greg for reporting a great story, which was our top story on BusinessWeek.com today and also our most-read and most-commented.