Yes - it's NEW!

A guided tour to the newly revamped, wide-screen format thedailysail.com Mk2

Welcome to the new look www.thedailysail.com. Yesterday, to coincide with the unveiling of the America's Cup boats in Valencia, we ourselves took the opportunity to unveil the new updated version of the site. We hope you like it.

First, the new site is wider, in line with ever increasing screen resolutions and wide screen-format PCs. If this presents a problem to any Mac Classic users remaining among us, the site can still be viewed in the original format by keying in this link: http://www.thedailysail.com/changeformat.

We have moved the navigation to our many specific homepages to the left hand side of the page. Rolling over 'Dinghy', 'Inshore' or 'Offshore' will present you with a drop down menu where you can find more specific content. Pages added recently include a TP 52 page within 'Inshore', for example.

Below this we have stand-alone pages for current events such as the America's Cup and Velux 5 Oceans and then our content divided up by type - news, features, photo galleries, etc. A new addition here is our 'multimedia' homepage including a nice video promo for the site that's worth checking out and all our video and audio content.

Also new, and highly relevant this week, is our 'Race Blogs' section. This is an about-to-be-very-rapidly filled archive for a new feature we've introduced to the site ready for the America's Cup racing in Valencia. Throughout the America's Cup we'll be providing live specialist commentry on the racing from the likes of top match racer Ian Williams via our Race Blog. This commentry auto-refreshes (at a speed determined by you) into a standalone re-sizable window you can bring up on your PC independent of thedailysail.

Also to be found here is a link to The Weekend Papers, thedailysail.com pdf weekly round up of the sailing news and features we've published - worth checking out if you haven't previously (you can sign up to be sent these via the link in the right hand column).

In our 'resource' section you can find our events calendar, along our clubs and classes directory. If you see any omissions from here please email us here.

Further down the left hand column you'll find a link to our RSS feeds, for those who use them, plus our specialist pages covering women's sailing, disasters, venue guides, etc.

At the bottom of the page is a 'simple' menu for those who prefer not to use Java and hence won't be able to use the drop down menu.

Another significant change is to be found at the bottom of the page where instead of having our normal 'news' and 'features' columns we have now divided up our content into 'offshore' 'inshore' and 'dinghy'. We have been a little embarrassed over the last few years how our dinghy readers have been disenfranced from thedailysail's homepage and we hope this will rectify this. Clicking on the strap for each of these links through to our overall 'offshore' 'inshore' and 'dinghy' homepages.

The new, wider right hand column is another new feature and expect further significant developments to this over the next few weeks. At present there are all the administrative links - you can find out who the masked men behind thedailysail.com are (we try to ensure this isn't one of those faceless, anonymous websites), our very useful Help FAQs in case you ever get into difficulty (along with contacts if you do and the Help FAQs don't help...)

If you have been away from the site for a few days then another new feature is that you can view our homepage editorials for the past week using the navigation over the top of the main homepage image.

Finally - our search function (above the RH column) is now very good and is a great way to quickly peruse the seven or so years worth of content lurking within our archives. Find out who won that championship back in 2002 or round up all the information you need on the Mini Transat for example. We've recently introduced an 'advanced' search where can narrow your search results using commands, such as 'and'/'or' like you can on Google.

We hope the new look site will reveal some of the hidden depths to thedailysail.com and that you enjoy the new format. More is on its way...!

Please feel free to send comments on the re-design here.

James Boyd, Andy Nicholson and the team at thedailysail.com