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CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS – ChicagoBusiness.com, the award-winning local business website powered by Crain’s Chicago Business, is seeking candidates for the position of Lead Web Developer. Along with its sister site, ChicagoRealEstateDaily.com, ChicagoBusiness.com delivers approximately 2 million monthly page views, and boasts a user base of over 200,000 registered users and subscribers. In addition to serving as the online home of Crain’s Chicago Business, continuous breaking news items, daily multimedia features, and over 3 million monthly email alerts help to cement ChicagoBusiness.com’s status as the nation-wide leader in the local business publishing space.

Job Title: Lead Web Developer

Job Responsibilities:

Assist in the design, development, and implementation of online initiatives for ChicagoBusiness.com and ChicagoRealEstateDaily.com. Day-to-day responsibilities include:

1. Consulting with internal business units in defining technical requirements and possibilities in order to achieve business and editorial goals and implementing those requirements;

2. Continued expansion of our custom built content-management system.

3. Integration with technical partners, fulfilling such mission critical functions as ad serving, print circulation, traffic analytics, email delivery, and content mobilization.

4. Insuring the timely delivery of major business and editorial initiatives;

5. Assist with ad inventory projections and management;

6. Project and personnel management of contractors and 3rd party vendors.

7. Staying abreast of current and emerging technologies, and the best practices of implementation thereof.

8. Manage simultaneous initiatives of varying scope and priority.

9. Develop and manage long-range projects involving new business opportunities and new editorial offerings.

10. Knowledge of industry best practices for Web user interface and user experience processes. General design qualities thereof.

Job Requirements:

The environment is a standard perl-based LAMP stack running on CentOs (Apache 2.052 / MySql 5.0.54 / Perl5.8.8). Production architecture consists of one database server and three application servers load-balanced across a network storage appliance.

Required technical skills include:

1. Expert perl knowledge, including OO perl, regular expressions, list idioms (map, grep, Schwartzian Transform, etc), and deeply-nested data structures.

2. Advanced knowledge of MySQL operations, including inner/outer joins, database indexing, schema development, and data optimization and optimization troubleshooting.

3. Client-side coding, including HTML, css, javascript, and ajax. Experience with javascript frameworks (prototype, scriptaculous, dojo, jquery, etc) is an asset.

4. HTTP protocols and communications, including custom apache configuration. SOAP/REST is desirable, and those candidates with mod_perl expertise are highly sought.

5. Unix operation and shell scripting.

6. Version Control (CVS/SVN)

7. Mod_rewrite in addition to mod_perl

8. Upcoming needs such as caching and performance tuning

9. Issue tracking in addition to SCM

User Experience and Design skills required. Here are some examples of that:

1. Expertise in Information Architecture, including the ability to implement and measure IA changes which have a positive business and usability impact

2. Consulting with all stakeholders in the maintenance of a flexible and extensible site taxonomy

3. Understanding of web analytics including the ability to create, define and measure metrics that are directly correlated with business and editorial objectives

4. Experience with the design and implementation of A/B testing programs related to advertising and circulation initiatives

5. Extensive knowledge of web standards, including best practices for cross platform web development; experience with mobile platforms desirable

6. Web design experience, including an understanding of the effective use of such elements as color, typography, and whitespace.

7. Wireframe and mockup creation

8. Understanding of the creative workflow including such topics as color management and video encoding; familiarity with Adobe software helpful

9. SEO implementation and tracking

Previous experience with publishing and content management highly desirable.

Crain Communications Inc is one of the largest privately-owned business publishers in the U.S. with over 30 leading business, trade and consumer titles in North America and Europe. As an authoritative source of vital news and information to industry leaders and consumers worldwide, each of the company’s newspapers, magazines and electronic news sites have become required reading in their respective sector of business and consumer market. Providing unmatched value and award-winning editorial excellence, the company is respected for its dependable journalism which readers have relied upon for over 90 years.

Crain Communications offers a competitive salary, a generous benefits package, profit sharing, and a friendly work environment. This is a great time to join our organization—a profitable, well established publishing leader.

To apply for this position please visit our website at www.crain.com and search under the employment section.

We thank you for your interest in Crain Communications and invite you to visit our website as positions are updated regularly. Crain Communications is an Equal Opportunity Employer.