I am very pleased to report that the upgrade of the site, as promised, has been a success. At the very least from a technical standpoint. Judging from the feedback I got so far from the usability perspective as well.

Now, I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who provided their feedback over the last year, especially the site's early contributors, readers and supporters. Both for helping set the direction of the project and for providing feedback on specific features, functions and issues.

Now let me comment on the "meat-and-potatoes" of this upgrade

First of all, a key goal of this update has been to preserve continuity of all the features, functions and offerings. I believe nothing has been broken though minor issues may surface and shall be promptly fixed. Note that the "legacy" navigation has been essentially preserved, except for replacing the top blocks in the middle column with directions on where their content has moved.

Once this basic update stabilizes (almost there), the site structure will be rearranged further to make it easier finding the most important features. Please do provide the feedback on what you want to be able to find first, whether you are a contributor, a reader, an external blogger or a guest. Especially valuable is what you think may be confusing at present. The current thinking is to make the frontpage light on content and turn into a guide to help new visitors and current members find services most relevant to them.

Aside from streamlining of the navigation, the next significant steps will be enhancements to member profiles and rollout of membership groups. Keep an eye for the updated Consumer Health World blog showing up here as well - along with announcement of details for the next Healthcare Blogging Summit 2007 in Las Vegas on April 30. Last but not least, the actual migration to http://trusted.md domain. Do not worry, the existing inbound links will be redirected though I do encourage you to update blogrolls.

I must say that there are just too many new things here to highlight in this post. Expect further details to come out naturally, either by being so intuitive that you can figure them out by just poking around or via being contacted by me or other member with an invite to try a specific feature. Expect an online FAQ too.

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