In case you hadn’t noticed we set a new site design live this weekend and I just wanted to give you a bit of background to what we’ve done, and why, and what we’re planning next.

What have we done?

• We’ve changed the main site navigation to use drop downs
• We’ve changed the homepage
• We’ve added some new ‘persona’ homepages (look under the ‘How can we help you?’ drop down)

Why have we done it?
There are two main drivers behind the updates:

1. To make it clearer to new visitors *what we do*. Sounds simple, but as you will probably know, that’s surprisingly hard. Our last homepage had some cool stuff on it but tended to confuse new visitors. 

2. To make it easier, and quicker, to find the content most relevant to you. Hopefully the drop-downs allow you to scan, and get to, our content quicker. And the ‘persona’ pages group content in ways that are useful: currently by discipline, organisation type and expertise level. 

Can you give feedback?
Yes, of course. Keen to hear any thoughts. Might be about bugs, design, functionality, navigation, CSS, accessibility issues etc. Two ways to feedback: 

1. Tweet your thoughts and include the hashtag #econtech
2. Reply to this post below

What are we planning next?
Following are what we’ve got on our immediate to do list. Again, if you’ve got any comments then feedback as above.

• Review your feedback and make any updates and changes accordingly
• Finesse the design (‘look and feel’) which we think still needs some work
• Further improve the site speed (we’ve done some stuff on this recently already)
• Localisation by country and further personalisation for logged in members

To be honest I'm not a casual browser of the site - I dive straight into blog posts from tweets / emails - so my only comment is why is the blog hidden under "more" in the nav? Is it really not such a big part of the site?

The nav and the site structure it exposes is nice and clear from my perspective.

I miss the scrolling logo already! :-)

I like it a lot & I think it's fine to cater for new vs old. I think it's great to have redesigned with such a specific objective - 'd love to hear how well it does with that & what you're tracking to measure it.

I'm happy the scrolling logo's gone. I thought it was great, but it made it impossible to read blog posts on my blackberry!

Well done, Ashley & the team!

I've only got as far as the homepage and it's not too pleasant.

I am using IE7 and my text size is set to "medium". The images and text are all overlapping and it's difficult to read. Your homepage only seems to like "smaller" and "smallest" text sizes.

I wonder what it will look like when set to "largest"...?

Congratulations on the new structure, it really helps to find your way round much better than the old version. 

But I don't quite agree with the looks. The range of the font size in particular makes it a bit difficult to deal with the content. The size of the caption on the navigation bar could very well be a bit smaller, especially when you try to switch quickly from the headlines (Training, Jobs, Events, etc.) to the content of the Twitter feed, the caption of which is tiny. 

And I definitely agree with Alia Formoy: Where is the blog? It's for me the main reason to visit your site as I can learn a lot from the posts. To my opinion it's one of the most important assets, so why hide it in the bottom? I think this could a vertical bar that runs from top to bottom.