As you may already have guessed dpreview.com has a new design. The biggest changes are the homepage, which has been totally redesigned, and the new site-wide widgets on the right hand column. From a user interface point of view the biggest change regular readers will need to adjust to is that the menu has moved from the left-hand side (where it's lived for a decade) to the top of the page. This will allow us to use the full width of your screen for some of our future developments. We hope you like it, and that you'll bear with us today as we iron out the inevitable bugs that will creep in after deploying such a significant code change.

Although the design and layout of dpreview.com is the most visible change happening today, there's a lot more to the redesign than meets the eye, and the changes 'under the hood' are much more involved and considerably more significant. They'll allow us to introduce new features and new review functionality far more easily, and should (we hope) improve overall site performance and reliability too.

Important note for IE6 users: the new version of dpreview no longer supports Internet Explorer 6.0. We recommend IE6 users upgrade to at least IE7 to continue to enjoy dpreview's increasingly rich features.

There are four main areas to the new home page:

  • Across the top is the new menu bar - this works in exactly the same way as the old one.
    On the far right side is the search box.
  • Below this is a scrolling 'featured content' display - use the white arrows on either side to cycle through the various screens.
  • The main content area on the right hand side of the home page is the latest news, which is essentially unchanged from the old design
  • The entire right hand column is now home to our new widgets. Some of these are context-sensitive, but most are visible site-wide.

Some of the widgets feature scrolling content. This scrolls automatically, but you can explore the content yourself using the dots or left/right arrows as indicated below.

We'll be introducing new widgets and new functionality to the right hand column over the next few months, and your feedback on this - and the rest of the redesign - is welcomed.