News

Welcome to the newly renovated globeandmail.com.

Last year, we took a look around our ever-expanding on-line house and decided it was time to arrange the furniture a little more intelligently, paint the walls in more contemporary shades and generally make our corner of the Web a more welcoming place to visit.

We hope you like it, and we hope you'll use the comment function on this article to tell us what you think.

While it's never easy to change, I am confident that in a very short period you'll become as enthusiastic about the new look as I am. Some highlights:

• An improved horizontal navigation accessible from every page of the site. This navigation bar links to all the major sections and will dynamically display sub-sections in each area. This should make it is easier and faster to explore the many areas of the site.
• A new and contemporary globeandmail.com logo that helps points us toward an exciting and changing future. We're particularly fond of the little red leaf.
• A new approach to colour. The site now uses more white space than before to create a simple, consistent and modern reader experience. We have introduced a few splashes of colour to improve navigation: red signifies premium content, available only to subscribers; green denotes general-interest tools and pages; blue is used on business tools and pages while orange tells readers they are encountering free utility content such as the weather, our popular poll or other daily features.

While many people were involved in creating the new appearance of this site, a few deserve special recognition. Adrian Norris, a designer who has been with The Globe and Mail since February 2000, gamely set his newspaper work to the side and tackled the challenge of reinventing globeandmail.com — no small task. In the early days of the redesign, he routinely embarrassed me with innocent questions like: "Why are there two completely different pages with exactly the same name?" On other occasions, it was his blunt observations: "Well, that just doesn't make any sense" that got me sputtering and eventually admitting that he did seem to have a point. Adrian quickly recruited in-house experts Tim Hellum, Mike Pletch and Craig Saila and that foursome (with the help of many, many, many others) has been the driving force behind the transformed site you see today.

On Tuesday from 1-2 pm EST, Adrian and I will be on-line to answer reader questions about the redesign. Please join us.

Angus Frame, editor, globeandmail.com