I'm really pleased to present to you our new design and face for the years to come. Built around the strengths of our old layout, the new design brings some much needed changes and improvements, both from a visual and functional perspective.

The new design was thought out to be cleaner and more modern from the inside out. The new base code no longer relies in tables but is fully drawn from CSS/XHTML, which should result in faster loading pages, and for us, an easier way to control how content is displayed. Kudos must go to Mike Rohde, formerly of Makalumedia, for his creative artwork, and Evan Agee, who worked on coding. Thanks a lot guys!

In total we spent around 8 months planning, designing and implementing the new design. Of course, we couldn't dedicate in full to it but this played to our advantage as we had plenty of time to test many different things, and experiment with what ultimately became the new revamped TechSpot.

Even when a sizable amount of time was spent checking for browser compatibility, we don't expect this first phase of the implementation to go 100% bug free, so please let us know if you find something that is not working for you. You will notice that a few new things have been added like news channels, improved tabbed navigation with clickable sub-menus, tabbed search for different site sections and Google search in one click, a load of new sub-sections (e.g. most popular downloads) and things like Top Stories. We recommend you browse around and find what's new.

At the same time, there are a few features that are still pending to be coded like a new poll system, so please bear with us in this respect. Most notably, our forums are not yet converted to the new layout. Rest assured that comes next in our list of priorities, in fact, as I was typing this we already received a lot of positive feedback from you guys in our boards. Thank you.

We also understand that not everybody welcomes change as widely as we wished for, however we truly believe the new design is a huge step forward and as has been the case before, in a matter of weeks or even days most of you will feel at home again as you get used to the new colors and organization of the site.

As always, thank you for your continued support and look forward bringing more and better content your way, soon.