I had hoped to launch a redesigned site this month. The design itself is complete, but we’ve decided to more thoroughly re-engineer the site in the process of applying this new design to all of the pages. And we can’t risk downtime next month, which follows the end of the quarter so every survey response will be critical. Consequently, the redesign will launch in May.

In the meantime, here’s a preview, the top of the redesigned homepage:

[Image no longer available, but of the current site pre-launch.]

So, what do you think?

A new logo better expresses the “socially-generated car data” essence of the site. There’s also a new tagline, “real car owners driving real car information.” I’m very excited about both.

The new pages will be 25 percent wider and based on a four-column grid, which will enable us to much more flexibly present the site’s information. Modules can span anywhere from one column to the entire page.

The car photo, a Prius here, will rotate among five different cars. With the current site some people complained that the header included three Asian-brand cars. This happened because the previous designer selected them without my input and only Honda and Hyundai didn’t restrict the use of their stock images. I’ve long wanted to fix this, and now it–along with many other shortcomings of the current, aged site design, will be fixed.

There’s a new “quick start” box, the engineering of which is one of the key reasons for the delay. The redesigned site will employ AJAX to improve usability.

There will also be a log in link at the top right of every page, which has been the most-requested change.

As the site has grown, I’ve gotten more and more bogged down in the daily operation of the site and have had less and less time to spend on improvements. With Gayla, much more skilled as a programmer than I am, now working “as fast as she can” and entirely focused on site improvements, these will occur much more frequently in the future. Once we get this big one out many smaller improvements will follow. Have something you’d like to see added or improved? Let us know.