As previously announced in Inside Salon, the public beta of our redesign has begun, and it's been very exciting to finally have people using the new site after months of development. So far we've welcomed several thousand Salon Premium members into the beta and many of those have sent us their feedback -- if you are among them, thank you very much for taking the time. The development team is reading all of the e-mail and making improvements to the site as we go. And we're ready to begin letting another round of people in to try it out. This will happen in the form of an invitation to our daily Newsletter subscribers (sign up here!), followed by a Site Pass overlay that will be shown to a set number of randomized readers at a time. We'll also be tweeting invitations at some point in the near future, so follow @SalonMedia and @joanwalsh and watch for that as well.
As a result of the feedback to date, we've already made a number of bug fixes and other adjustments, such as how the wires are presented on the front page. Additionally, there are parts of the new site we are still working on -- including, for example, the presentation of the Comics and the way the print function works.
We're also still evolving the cover. Although much of our traffic doesn't come through the front page, we want that page to do the best possible job of presenting the most recent content to the readers who use it. We also recognize that not all readers access and process information in the same way. We've designed an extremely robust new cover that puts a lot of content on display and does so in a bold, dynamic way. Many of the beta readers have raved about this cover; many have commented against it. We are continuing to fine-tune the design and the wiring of it in a quest to satisfy the various needs of our readers.
We want to hear from you about how you use Salon and what you'd like to see as we move forward. That's the purpose of the public beta program. As I said, we read and appreciate every e-mail, so once you've seen the new site please do send us your thoughts.
-- Richard Gingras
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