ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ

A word of warning: Civil Beat will look a little different Monday.

We’ll be taking the site off line for a few hours Sunday (in case you’re having trouble accessing it) and, barring any technical problems, we’ll come back up with a fresher, cleaner look to the home page as well as the story pages.

It’s been about a year since we did a full re-design and since then we’ve learned more about how users interact with the site and what we can be doing to engage people even more in the news, events and issues that are important in Hawaii.

Here’s a sneak peek:

As you’ll see on Monday, it’s mainly the upper part of the home page that is changing. We’re boosting more news “above the fold” (it’s an old newspaper term), replacing what had been a single top story with a centerpiece surrounded by news headlines and announcements.

Civil Beat has grown into a robust and expanding community of users who are keenly interested in civic affairs. And our home page gets a lot of traffic from people who return throughout the day to see what’s new.

We’ll use those four spaces in the left rail (another old newspaper term) to highlight interesting developments throughout the day — just quick hits to keep you in the loop or get you thinking about something new. They’re also a good spot to announce upcoming events like a Civil Cafe or highlight content we think you’ll like.

Another change to point out: We’re separating news from opinion in this new design.

Currently opinion content is labeled as an editorial, or a column or a Community Voice, but it flows through the site side by side with the news stories. We are seeing more and more community participation in Civil Beat — and we’ve added regular editorials of our own — so we feel it’s become important to more clearly distinguish between reported, arms’-length news articles and the more passionate voices from around the islands.

To that end, we’ll feature our regular columnists, opinion pieces by our Editorial Board and contributions from community members in a new, distinct section of our home page.

Story pages have been redesigned to allow us to display photos and other features more prominently in some cases. We’re making it easier to find and click on related stories, audio and video.

Civil Beat continues to be a work in progress and that’s how it should be. Even though you may not think so, we do hear you when you tell us what you think and we do take it into consideration, as we’ve done with this update. Ours is a dynamic community, so please keep telling us what you think and help us get better.