Thanks for sticking around for the past month, folks! I’ve appreciated hearing from you, getting suggestions, and meeting some of you in person at our events.

As a result of your (many) comments, we’ve made some notable fixes and improvements to the site over the last month:

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1. The design of section pages now updated with improved look and organization, including making blogs more prominent, adding number of comments, making photos bigger.
2. To make it easier to find what you’re looking for, we’ve added a compact calendar and directory search to the upper-right corner of the homepage. Additionally, many other features have been streamlined and relocated, so please explore the site to see it all.
3. You can now always view the five newest articles that have been published right on the homepage.
4. Finally, and perhaps most usefully, the Movie Showtimes module has been given a huge upgrade, and now features summaries, photos, and the latest showtimes for all first-run theatrical films. Additionally, any hyperlinked title of a film will link you directly to Buzz’s review of it (unfortunately, a gray title means that we do not yet have a review filed for the film… if you want to help with that, we’re always looking for new writers).

That takes care of the major, most glamorous changes to the site. Obviously, we’ve also been making behind-the-scenes changes to fix problems, as well as make your experience better. Still having problems with anything? Think something should work differently? Email me, and we’ll see what we can do.

Hello and welcome to the217.com!

Many people from WPGU, Buzz, and the Illini Media Company as a whole have put in many, many long hours, sleepless nights, and blood, sweat, and tears into the site. I’m proud to welcome you as our first guests to check out what we’ve been up to.

First and foremost, this site is your home for everything that’s entertaining and enlightening in Champaign-Urbana. Hence, our slogan: I invite you to get out and explore everything that Champaign-Urbana has to offer, and come back to visit us and sound off about what you loved and hated (Though, if you’re following our recommendations, hopefully there won’t be too many things you hate).

There are more features built-in to this site than we could possibly list, but a short overview would have to include:

• Live playlists, DJ profiles, our live netstream, and a comprehensive artist index with biographies and album reviews from WPGU-FM.
• All the articles from every week’s Buzz magazine, plus tons of online exclusive articles and coverage, including full photo galleries and next-day concert reviews from the Buzz staff.
• A fully searchable, in-depth calendar covering pretty much anything that’s going on in Chambana (Like CuCalendar, but on steroids… minus the tiny balls).
• A directory of nearly every restaurant and bar in Champaign-Urbana, searchable by a variety of features and cuisines. This feature is truly kick-ass (I’ve been using it A LOT since we went into beta mode).
• Over a dozen blogs spanning the complete breadth of the topics we cover, written by people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about.
• Last, but most certainly not least, the ability to comment on every article, blog, restaurant listing, and album that we have in our database

Also, don’t forget to register for your own shiny, new the217.com account. You’ll need one to comment and submit calendar events anyway, but if you register in the month of November, you’ll also be eligible to win some sweet prizes (including a MacBook!)

Now, as with any new site, I’m sure there’ll be a few kinks to work out as you all start messing around with the site. If you see any problems or errors, just click the “Find an Error?” link at the bottom of any page and tell us about it. Or, you can just e-mail me at producer@the217.com with any questions, comments, or concerns. If we missed your event in the calendar or business in the directory, click on the link to send us updated infomation for the relevant section. Bottom line: we want this site to be a great experience for you, which means being complete and bug-free (as soon as possible).

So that’s the end of my welcome spiel. Thanks for stopping by the check us out. I hope you like what you see, and that you come back to us again really soon. (How does tomorrow work for you?)

Over and out.