Welcome to the new CBR!

As you can see, there are a lot of changes around here, and we’d like to tell you a little about them starting with one of the biggest additions to CBR, the new Reviews section. This is a major development for the site, and we've staffed Reviews with four major writers, many of whom you are already familiar with from their excellent books and blogs: Timothy Callahan, Kevin Church, James Hunt and Greg McElhatton, with longtime CBR reviewer Augie De Blieck, Jr. managing the team. They're all voracious comics readers and we think you're going to look forward to what they have to say.

Another great new feature of the new CBR is our dedicated Previews section. Now, all the previews sent out by publishers will be neatly collected in one location, allowing for all sorts of organized searching. It's just the start of a new database of comics we're building from the ground up, and we’ll only continue to add to it both in terms of content and features over the coming months.

The most seriously expanded feature from the old site is our new Comic Shop Locator. The new system allows for links to Google Maps and, shortly, retailers will be able to create profiles containing more information about their stores. We'll make a big announcement once those tools are ready to be launched.

As if that wasn’t enough, there's also our newly created New Comics List, which can help you create a new pull list for your retailer, or just use it to keep track of what’s released and when. This is only the first phase of our New Comics List, and we'll be adding some really cool new features to it in the coming days.

Of course, as we launch this new site, there's a chance - probably a good chance - you may find some bugs here and there. If you discover something that doesn't appear to work properly or doesn't do what you think it should do, feel free to send us a bug report telling us what we screwed up and the URL we should look at. What you may see a bit of is some weird formatting from time to time in articles published on the old site -- point those out, too! We greatly encourage your feedback to help tackle any missed bugs that got through the harrowing beta testing stage.

Now, who put this sucker together? It all started with Matt Brett, who as you can tell is an amazingly talented designer. All the HTML, XHTML, CSS and graphics were handled by Matt. And take a look at the new flourish on the CBR logo at the top of the page. That is damned hot! I can't speak highly enough of Matt's skills as a designer and look forward to doing more with him in the future.

Once we had a design in place, it was time to program the beast. This proved to be the most challenging part of building the new site, causing at least one programmer to simply disappear from the internet without a trace. Courtesy of Oni Press’ James Lucas Jones, we found Frank Beaton, who took on the Herculean task of programming a new content management system for CBR from the ground up. Additionally, Frank found a way to bring over the archives from the old site and create proper redirects for the search engines.

That’s right! No deleted content! No bad links on anybody’s resumes! Ha!

Yeah, that's right, pretty much the entire site was built by one guy. Take a bow, Frank! He'll be staying on and will be leading the development over the next year of the new CBR. We've got much more to come!

Joining the project towards the end was David Lenwell, who built our New Comics List and worked on a handful of javascripting here and there. David will be doing more in the coming months as CBR continues to introduce new features.

Thanks are due to the following people for their assistance and/or support through the process of building this new site -- James Hightower, Mark Luntzel, Chris Harshman, Andy Khouri, Beau Yarbrough and Clay Loveless.

We also wish to thank our friend Jim MacQuarrie, another phenomenal designer. Jim was the man responsible for the previous incarnation of CBR and the creator of our logo. While Matt Brett gave some great flair to the design, it's the same logo we've been using since December of 1999 when Jim turned it in - got it right on the first try.

There you have it, the All-New CBR! Remember, this is just phase one of the rollout. We've got plans to expand current features and lots of great ideas for new ones (some of which are already in development). The next few months will be a very exciting time around CBR, and I’d like to thank all of you for being along for the ride.

If you have any comments or questions about the new CBR, we’d love to hear from you..

Best,

Jonah Weiland

Executive Producer, CBR

Discuss this story here on CBR's Q&A Forum.