But nothing has been changed for change's sake. The feedback we received from the reader survey conducted late last year told us that the original site was highly regarded for its clarity and appearance so we've preserved much of its core character. And the nature and style of our news and feature stories will also remained much unchanged for the same reason.

What we have done is make pages wider to make better use of screens that are larger than they were in 1999, and we've changed the navigation tabs to more clearly describe what is in different sections of the site. These sections are also mostly new, with the first three top tabs - Home, Designers and Process - in particular, describing a more logical and intuitive way to group the main CDN story types that are listed in the sub-menus of these sections.

Another obvious change is the reorganised home page that has several columns running side by side so that readers can quickly access a broad spread of information without having to scroll down the page.  We've also increased the size of images in articles, and will be introducing more new features later in the year such as a powerful car design image search tool.

Beyond 2006 we will be launching new features and services that the new site system has been specifically designed to enable us to do - bringing even more value and resources to the car design community. Meanwhile, in the short term it's possible that we'll have the occasional teething problem with the new system, so please bear with us and drop us a line if you find something amiss...

We hope you like the new site, appreciate what we're doing, and continue to regularly visit Car Design News as we continue to bring you stories on the latest and most interesting car designs, events and other related news from around the world.

All the best from the CDN team!