We've had the painters and decorators in to work with a few tradies to rewire and replumb the site and generally give us a more modern, streamlined look thats easier to navigate and easier on the eye.
 
Here's a walkthrough of some of the main changes...
 
First of all, you’ll see we’ve changed the colour of the masthead. This is mainly because, by the time of the next grand final, we would have had the exact same colour scheme for five years...there wasn’t anything wrong with – but it was time for a change, and the white/grey/red thing gives a bit of creative space to the site and makes it feel less cluttered.
 
We’ve also relocated all the social media buttons and site login to a Google-style homepage bar at the top for ease of access.
 
The podcast and newsletter tabs are now popouts from the side and persistent when you scroll up and down so you will always be able to find them without them interfering with the rest of the site.
 
The menu is largely the same but reorganised to give a slightly more macro-to-micro logic to it, and make it easy to find our match commentaries.
 
What used to be called blogs are now Opinions, on rotation at the top right hand corner.
 
The change of name is important - these are opinion columns like our magazine columns. Blogs were originally weB Logs – a log of sites the blogger had visited with notes. That concept has moved on now, but our writers are not just bloggers. They have well-formed opinions and a great writing style that deserves respect.
 
The most obvious change here are the main headline pics.
 
Since we launched, fast broadband speeds have spread and now ADSL 2+ is commonplace. When we first started we had just two banners rotating. That grew to three and now we regularly have four.
 
The new smaller banner means we can now run five at a time without overly slowing down page load times. And the smaller pic means we can also display headlines for each of the banner stories as a menu at the side of the carousel.
 
We've also gone for brevity in the stories below the main headlines - at a glance you can see all five next biggest stories/picture galleries without having scroll up and down the page.
 
We've also increased the font size of the Australia and World News section to make them easier to read. We've changed the main font across the entire site to something crisper and cleaner.
 
We also now have a picture galleries slider to give you instant access to all our recent picture specials, again without having to go look hard for them.
 
Below that you'll see a second big banner headline - this is our main feature story. We have a lot of great features on the site that don't get read as much as they deserve because they're so far down the page. Hopefully this will grab your attention!
 
Below that are the latest features and the latest columns, again with the focus on instantly being able to see what they're about and hopefully draw your attention and interest.
 
Finally we have our Twitter feed on the right now giving you a taste of what we're reading on our Twitter feed right now (not just what we're saying...) It's updated in real-time so just refresh the page to see the latest updates. Likewise our Facebook page above that.
 
So that’s the homepage - similar chnages are across the site on the A-League homepage and Socceroos homepage too, plus each of the club pages.
 
Article pages have also been given a tweak.
 
Instead of the tiny square pic we used to run, we now have a bigger landscape pic so you can actually see more than a player's head ...and finally with a caption too!
 
We’ve also added a 442 comment count icon to the top and bottom of the article alongside the facebook and twitter gadgets and streamlined the connection between the article and its comments (and pimped up the comments UI while we were at it!).
 
Our keyword tags finally work as they always were intended to - but never did. Click on one of the key words at the top of an article and you instantly be presented with a list of similar stories containing that keyword - whether it's the epl, socceroos Victory or Romario!
 
And our much loved forums have also been given a dust and brush up with the new font running throughout and we've axed the old-fashed faux 3D buttons for a simpler more modern interface.
 
Overall, we're delighted with our renovated home - the reaction this morning since we launched has been great, with compliments flowing in from all over (check out our Twitter feed to see them for yourselves!) - and we hope you'll be very happy here with us!