Change is hard. People generally fear change, particularly when that change represents an unknown. You can see some of that in the comments on my announcement post from Thursday, although it's so far frankly more supportive and positive than I dared expect.

Still, I thought it might help to explain what we're trying to do in the redesign, and hopefully assuage some of the fears about the new direction. When we sat down to work on this, these were are goals:

• Accentuate the positive: When we originally spec-ed out Pegasus News we thought we were trying to be the second coming of the Dallas Times-Herald. As such, the architecture of the site and its look and feel were that of a traditional newspaper website. As time has gone on, we've realized that we're still a long way from being able to afford complete original newsgathering of the level of a metro daily. At the same time, most users who hit our site for the first time, usually through a Google search, don't see the unparalleled wealth of databased info (events, drink specials, schools, government bodies) and arts/dining/entertainment coverage that is so far our strongest suit. So in a way, we've inverted the thinking: Instead of a news site with great actionable databases, we're a database-driven arts and entertainment site with news. It also means that the voice and attitude of the site that so many have cited as a strength must at least stay intact, if not further accentuated.
• Bust the myths: After reading through a dozen original pieces written by our staff in a given day, plus the work of our more than 100 content partners, it's hard for us to hear the popular but unfair criticism that we're "just an aggregator." That's a misperception that can get created by the quick flow of the masses of content on the site, and the fact that in any given few hours the balance may swing one way or the other. So we wanted to make the "good stuff" live longer and be more visible, while maintaining our goal of keeping you abreast of the basics of the watercooler news of the day.
• Make the complexity evident by simplifying: As one commenter pointed out, we have a lot of databases. The trouble is that in many cases, we have so much data, over so many interlinking categories that it can be hard to understand just what's in there, much less how to find what you're looking for. Case in point: We currently have over 2,100 local bands on the site. And the page that list them is utterly useless. People engage with band profiles via events, but there's not currently a useful way to browse. Another: We have a ridiculous amount of data in our restaurant listings, but by hitting you over the head with such arcane (but awesome) things as whether a place has Golden Tee Golf, the search interface is really daunting. So we've done a lot of things to surface the information that you've told us is most useful; make it more browsable and searchable; and then give you the extra details only when you want them.
• Get more people to stay: It's no secret that we get a lot of visitors every month and that a lot of them come in because our site is built in a way that is friendly to the search engines. The trouble is that we always want more of those people to become regulars, but it is hard to communicate on a first pageview why a busy browser should stick around. So we've tried to do a better job of communicating what's different and relevant on every page, while not dumbing things down for the regulars. In some cases (like the homepage) it means a different styling for different people. In most, it means leveraging our databases to show you even more relevant content that might just convince you to make that extra click.
• Get more people to register: We don't believe in forcing people to register for user accounts just to read. That means that we have to provide enough compelling reasons for people to register (which I think we do) and communicate those well (which we don't). One of our most important metrics of success on the redesign and ongoing iterations is the percent of visitors who register for an account.
• Get more people using the Daily You: This is an adjunct to registration, but an important one. Many of you have told us that The Daily You is one of the most compelling features of the site. And, candidly, our best way of helping advertisers. It gets better for everyone, providing smarter results and deeper customization, the more it is used. We want to accelerate its growth and accuracy -- and the only way to do that is to get more registered users on the site more often.
• Find better ways of getting advertiser messages to the right people at the right time: From the first draft of my business plan, one of the primary goals of Our Little Business was finding an answer to the broken model of traditional advertising. And while we've made some strides in that area, even when we're super-targeting, we're still doing so through the somewhat traditional means of banner ads. And while those (and the occasional flash ad) are still the primary means that are a.) available and b.) widely accepted by advertisers -- we're still trying to find better ways of delivering the message. So we've tried to generate some creative solution, whether through relevant text cues or other ways to advertise outside the traditional banner construct. I know that there are users who aren't happy with some of the ad units we've been running lately -- but we have to keep the lights on, and the only way we can weed out those sorts of ads is by creating other types that outperform them.
• Make it prettier: I'm not afraid to admit it: My baby is ugly. The site was designed in 2004 and looks like it was designed in 1998. (That's no offense to the original designer: He just wasn't given time or latitude to do it right. That's not for a lack of care, but for never having the financial resources at the right time to do something about it. Now that the opportunity is here, we're trying to make something as modern, elegant and unique as we hope our service is.
• Fix stuff that was broken: For all the innovations on the site, there are some things that have never worked very well. Great example: Our site search. It's an open-source search that was built in the early 2000's and never updated. We who use the site every day have learned workarounds, but that doesn't help the average user. So, we've completely rebuilt and retuned the search function and included more sorting parameters and visual cues to help you find what you want. There are all manner of other little bugs that have been biting us for years that we'd put off fixing because they involved major rewiring. Our dev team has written and re-written more lines of code in the last six months than we've written in our entire existence so that we can address those problems
• Replicate it: While we've always envisioned Our Little Business serving other cities, it's only now becoming a reality. That requires some shifts in thinking: Things that are held together with spit and bubblegum for one site will break with five. Inefficiencies that we could deal with on one site are untenable in a network. For instance, in a case of the cobbler's children lacking shoes, we've long lamented that our system requires us to upload one photo at a time, even for a large gallery. To increase the visuals here and add other sites, we had to build not just a bulk uploader, but one that played nicely with our databases. There are lots of little examples of things we've done to make things more efficient so we can do more.

So that's the thinking behind the redesign. In the next post, I'll start showing some of the goods.