DesignLens is a fee-based subscription resource, and its users include builders, developers, architects, interior designers and suppliers. These subscribers gain awareness and knowledge of the most influential design trends affecting our industry. DesignLens users testify that this strategic Web-based tool assists them in formulating market strategies and ensuring their communities and products adhere to the highest standards of architecture and merchandising.

Professional Builder's mission is to provide professional solutions to our readers and advertisers. We believe subscribers who use this innovative product will elevate and improve their market performance in what is bound to be, at least in the short term, a more challenging marketplace.

Each month on DesignLens, subscribers have access to model home and master plan tours of innovative communities. The Web site also contains one of the industry's most comprehensive libraries of images, floor plans, site plans and ideas. Professional Builder will share insightful features from DesignLens on HousingZone.com and also expand the DesignLens Web site's depth of coverage and scope of information.

Professional Builder seeks to grow this publication into a thriving and robust forum of ideas. Our association with DesignLens advances this core objective and integrates into the Professional Builder portfolio a resource to assist our readership in creating powerful product inspired by great architecture and beautifully executed merchandising environments. Our hope is that DesignLens will act as the housing industry's design library, a multi-dimensional warehouse of ideas that inspires, guides and instructs our readership. Ultimately, DesignLens chronicles the amazing achievements of one of America's great industries.

The Professional Builder team is committed to joining with the DesignLens staff to intensify the reach and power of this unique resource. We're confident the existing DesignLens program will become even more illuminating and powerful when married to the technical ingenuity residing at Professional Builder.

In the next couple of years, builders and developers will encounter a more discriminating and tentative consumer who will defer a purchase unless our homes are captivating. That truth references all product types, ranging from entry-level homes to luxury estates, from traditional townhouses to urban high-rises. The visionary builders and developers combine entrepreneurial spirits with knowledge and information platforms to ensure that their house designs leave an impact, are current and are well-conceived. DesignLens symbolizes that platform. The Professional Builder team is excited to meld this tool and service into our portfolio.

630.288.8160, ncrum@reedbusiness.com