Our New Look

Welcome to Seattle Weekly's overhauled Web site. We launched this new look on Jan. 1, 2006. Although we're pleased to update the appearance of SeattleWeekly.com, we're especially excited about the functionality under the hood.

We haven't radically changed the way we organize information for browsing, but on the home page and on the main subject pages we've improved presentation to make it easier to scan for what you want. And the new navigation bar across the top of every page should make it quicker to jump to other areas of the site. There are other ways to "drill down" through Seattle Weekly content. Click on a byline to browse that writer's entire body of work. Click on a column name to see the archive of that column.

One of the coolest changes involves browsing for events, films, restaurants, and club listings. Look for the tabbed box near the top of the home page and move your mouse over the tabs to see the various options. On the main pages for Food, Music, Arts, and Film, this tabbed box is customized for each section's content.

As for appearance, we chose colors that evoke Seattle and the Northwest — colors that would be easy on the eyes and not overwhelm words and images. The fonts we use are Trebuchet for headlines and Georgia for text. Trebuchet is a stylish sans-serif Web font, and Georgia is a serif Web font that is easy to read at smaller sizes. Both were invented at Microsoft.

Almost everything on the site now resides in a database, and soon everything will. Putting everything in a database enables you to browse and search more easily, and it enables us to present information in ways we are only just now imagining. We've also improved the article search function on the site, and you can get a greater variety of RSS feeds than before. (If you are unfamiliar with RSS, there's a pretty extensive explanation here.)

There are some loose ends. We have most events in database form but not yet all, so some listings can't be searched as easily. That's coming. Also still to come: blogs, increasing use of multimedia, and other, not-so-obvious improvements that we wish to keep under wraps right now.

Naturally, we'd like to know what you think of the new look and hear any suggestions you might have. Send your comments here.