As most of you have no doubt noticed, we’ve made a few changes to the Café this month—well, actually more than a few. Bill has racked up scores of hours in behind-the-scenes machinations that we hope have made the Café more visually appealing, easier to navigate, and more responsive. Our goal has been to make your visits to the Café more pleasant and to help you quickly sort through our steadily growing archive of articles, photos, and videos. We have also put a lot of effort into making the site ‘snappier’ by reducing latency and eliminating bottlenecks.

We’ve re-tuned the way mobile devices display site content. As one reader wrote, “…the new Soaring Cafe format for the iPad is outstanding, a significant improvement. It is kind of like going from an old house with contemporary furniture to a new home with modern decor and furniture, refreshing. Really easy to navigate and when you click on an article the format is much like a book; I like it.”

Of course, we hope all of you who view our site with mobile devices feel the same way; but whether you love it or hate it, please let us know.

Now, we’d like to point out a few highlights of our remodeling job, starting with some changes we made to the site organization and layout.

One of our objectives was to make the home page less crowded. To that end, we increased the page width and added more white space. We switched to a sans serif font and ‘softer’ style for the text in some sub-headings and made other font changes throughout the content. We also increased the line spacing. We hope these changes help make the content easier to read, especially for those of us for whom reading glasses (or magnifying glasses!) are now de rigeur.

We wanted to clearly demarcate and identify content in the major sections of the home page, so the left-hand column is now reserved for articles of a general nature and the center column for more ‘newsy’ posts. Racing news appears in the the lower half of the page.

The small arrows (circled in red below) at the right end of the home page section headers take you to a list of ALL posts that have appeared in those sections. The post titles and lead paragraphs appear in reverse chronological order. Click the page numbers at the bottom to go further back in time.

The Café now hosts over 2,500 posts and even more images and videos. We want to make all this content accessible in a few clicks as possible, and to this end, we’ve added reorganized and changed the menus and implemented alphabetical and chronological searches by content category. The most powerful new feature for locating content, however, is the internal Google search field at the right-hand end of the menu bar (see the screenshot below). Please let us know how these new features work for you—or not.

The image wall is another addition to our panoply of search tools. This one is mostly for amusement and playful exploration rather than directed searches. Select the Image Wall menu, click on an image and you’ll end up at its parent post. Let serendipity reign!

We added a Site Content menu to display links to each of our Café columns, as shown in the following screenshots. The menu also displays links (not shown) to each installment in the Concordia series and to each major contest whose reports have graced these pages.

The Latest and Greatest menus have been around for a long time, but we include them here as a reminder, The Latest can be helpful in quickly reviewing recent posts that have moved off the front page, and the Greatest are those that have garnered the most page views. The latter can be especially helpful if you’re new to the Café and want to catch up on the most popular posts.

We added a menu for classified ads to help readers view all posted classifieds in addition to the most recent ads, which appear in the right-hand sidebar.

The Contributors menu will introduce you to our staff of regular—wait for it!—contributors. We plan to add photos and bios for the newest recruits.

We hope this tour of Soaring Café 2.0 has been helpful. We welcome constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement, so let us know what you think!