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Civil Beat recently celebrated its fourth birthday, which we marked with a really great party at Chad Blair’s house. There were many old friends and quite a few new ones.

Several members of our original crew returned for the evening, including founding editor John Temple and former assistant editor Sara Lin, as well as our relatively recent arrivals — the HuffPost Hawaii staff. In fact, the story of Civil Beat could easily be told through the people sipping good wine on Chad’s huge lanai or squeezed into a circle on his living room floor passing a guitar among them. Kids chased each other around his sweeping front lawn.

Four years ago we had no idea what would happen. Startups are by definition places to experiment with new ideas and Civil Beat has certainly done that, sometimes with success, sometimes not so much. We’ve grown and evolved in different ways since we powered up the website in 2010. We’ve added staff on both the editorial and business teams, beefed up our use of photography and digital tools and extended our reach both locally and nationally.

Our original crew of half a dozen or so mostly young writers and editors has grown up, too. We’ve added new families and gotten married. We’re even about to have a baby. Looking around the crowd at Chad’s party, I was struck by how comfortably we have settled down. A solid reflection of life in the islands.

Some things haven’t changed. Civil Beat is still the only Hawaii news organization that focuses exclusively on public policy issues through a mix of investigative and watchdog reporting. We’re still the place that fosters community dialogue on important issues. We’ve built a pretty good civic square that has become a forum for many different voices.

We’re obviously thrilled that Civil Beat has been wholeheartedly embraced by the community. And that has sparked us to move forward in ways we hope will make the civic square even better.

We’ve recently started a few new things you’ve likely noticed. We now have a Sunday edition that’s intended to wrap up the week just ended while getting you ready for the coming week. Besides the latest stories from the weekend, the Sunday site includes “The Projector,” a review of the week’s news events through the lens of our chief photographer, PF Bentley, and other staffers. “Civil Reads” shares really good stories by journalists across the country that our staff and readers have curated. And coming soon: a Civil Beat podcast.

We’ve been taking the civic square on the road, too. “Civil Cafe” is a monthly community gathering that is proving quite popular with people who are interested in hearing from policy makers and other experts in an intimate setting where questions and answers can flow freely. These events were called “Beat Ups” when we used to jam people into our Kaimuki office for an evening. But they’ve grown larger than the fire marshal might like, so we’ve been experimenting with other locations — like at Fresh Cafe in Kakaako and at UH — and they’ve been a real draw. We plan to roam even further, out of urban Honolulu to other neighborhoods, even neighbor islands, in the coming year.

Our ability to try new things is partly due to new community partners who in the last year or so have become interested in joining us in encouraging a robust dialogue on important topics. You’ve probably seen sponsors supporting some of our events, and don’t be surprised to see civic-minded companies underwriting some of our work.

We’ve brought on new staff to help us in our efforts. On the business side, Gene Park, our community manager, has been joined by Mike Webb, sales and marketing director for Peer News. Before moving to Hawaii, Mike was the vice president of communications for ProPublica, the national investigative website. He has also worked as publicity director for The Nation and helped promote the work of the Brennan Center for Justice.

We’ve added new journalists, too. Richard Wiens is our new managing editor, a veteran of 30 years in the news business including as a political and government editor. He was most recently editor and publisher of the Del Norte Triplicate, a newspaper in the far-northern California town of Crescent City.

But the biggest change you’ll see is our new website. We’re moving to a cleaner, brighter look that also allows us much more flexibility to display news, Community Voices, blogs, photos and videos, depending on what is most important or most interesting. The new site lends itself to great visual storytelling and trending topics in a way that just isn’t possible in our current system.

Just as we’ve evolved our operations over the past four years, our look and feel has changed, too. So much so that none of us could remember what it looked like even two years ago let alone in 2010.

You can check out our very first home page at the top of this article. And here’s a screen shot from June 2010, just a couple months after launch.

What I notice most is that it’s a gray sea of text and type. Photos are practically non-existent.

There’s also nothing that would tell you what the community thinks about anything. The home page is very story-driven, as though we’re saying: Here’s the news we think you need to know.

Nearly three years later, we evolved to a new look and feel. Visuals are better and, through the use of an active discussion column and by giving more space to Community Voices, we offered readers a more prominent place in the civic square. It’s so much more colorful, too.

That 2013 iteration isn’t too far from the site we’re using today. Last fall we opened up the home page to make better use of photos but that knocked readers’ voices down a bit.

The new design we’re launching in a few days takes us squarely into the modern world of news websites. In the past couple years technology has allowed text, photo and video to flow seamlessly across, up and down a page. The New York Times “” project drew rave reviews, while web pages became much more like magazines, with huge photos that bleed into long stories bolstered by interactive graphics.

But that sort of beautiful presentation takes more than just a new back-end system. It takes a development team with a staff of graphic artists and multimedia professionals days to put together all but the most basic packages.

We’re not quite there yet. But someday, as we continue to evolve and grow, you might see a Civil Beat newsroom that includes some of the skills needed to bring our civic square to life in a way that we might not have dreamed of four years ago.

We’re taking the holiday weekend to migrate from our old system to the new. The site will be down for a few hours on Sunday but we should be back up later in the evening. And we apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Meanwhile, here’s a sneak peek at the new Civil Beat. Please tell us what you think.