Tomorrow is an important day: we will be archiving the old users' page that we are used to seeing when visiting cern.ch from a CERN IP range.

For some people this big change will feel intrusive, unwelcome or wrong. Some of you might be quite angry, confused, annoyed. Please keep feedback coming through this time. Here's how we are going to use it:

The CERN users' page is changing.

You may have noticed over the last few months that editorial content such as news and announcements have moved from the users' page to the new CERN website.

One of the key tasks that people need to achieve on the new website is see what events are happening - both today (or 'now') and coming up; this is especially true for CERN people and scientists. We are going to work over the next couple of weeks at improving the way that we import event information from Indico and display it in various parts of the site. This isn't easy, however: there is an awful lot of content in Indico and we need to sift through it and make decisions about what should be displayed in the website.

In our third sprint of this year we worked on building new layouts for the CERN people and Scientists sections. Based on the feedback we gathered (thank you!) we wanted to provide a much more dense overview of content in these two sections. You will see that we moved to a three-column layout on larger screens for these two pages.

We had a 'soft' release of new features last night at the end of our second design sprint of the year. Here are some of the things we did over this past sprint:

It is really important for us to test whether we are on track with the architecture and design of the site while it's still in pre-release.

The feedback we have had to date suggests that we're nearly there with the sections targeted at the public, but that we still have work to do to meet the needs of the CERN community. In particular, many of you felt that no part of the new site would serve well as your new homepage on a daily basis.

There are a variety of different content types in the new website's information architecture. One of these is announcements. These are short, informative notices targeted at the CERN community and can be created by anyone with a CERN primary account.

To post an announcement:

Thanks so much to everyone who has given feedback on the pre-release version of the new website to date. I have endeavoured to reply to every feedback in person, but I may have missed a few people due to the sheer number of responses. Here, in no particular order, is a round-up of some of the questions that came up multiple times, along with my answers.

The new core CERN website is now in pre-release, and is available here: http://cern.ch/home

The communications group will be publishing content to this new site on a daily basis from now on. The new site will run in parallel with existing websites - the public and users' websites and the Bulletin - until at least spring 2013.