Thanks for all of the great feedback on our new site! One reason for our redesign was to make it easier for readers to access our archives, and expand the kind of information we can offer. The navbar on every page is our first effort in that direction, and we thought it might be helpful to explain a little bit about what’s behind each button on the bar.

HOME: Um, we’ll skip the explanation on that one. If you’re lost, just, you know, click it.

TOPICS: This is where you can find a lot of our archival content, organized by categories. Want to find all posts about sending an EECB? Now you can, without having to wade through thousands of tags or run a search. We’ve tried to make the Topics intuitive and straightforward, and will refine them as needed to make sure they’re making the site easier to use.

COMPANY DIRECTORY: We’ve organized this section of the site to make it easier to find information about companies that we cover regularly. For each company, we’ve included a brief profile (courtesy of Wikipedia), and the most recent entries related to that company. One click will get you everything we’ve published about the company. We’ll be adding a lot to the company profiles, including exclusive Consumerist info, like executive email addresses and phone numbers.

ARCHIVES: This is where you can find everything on the site, by tag, date or author. If you’re looking for all posts by a specific author, or want to find something you read during a specific month, you’ll find it here.

PHOTO GALLERY: We wanted to be able to share more of the great images that readers are adding to our flickr pool, so we made this a permanent part of our navigation. If you like a picture and want to learn more about it, there are links to a detail page here, as well as back to the photo’s flickr page.

SIDEBAR: We’ve tried to include a few useful widgets here, including a Hot Stories box, an expanding Topics menu to make it easier to jump to a specific topic, and an auto-updated list of our most popular posts. We’ll be adding more tools here, and will be refining these to make sure they’re helping you find the right content .

This is just the first step; we’ll be updating the navigation and tools on the site regularly. Let us know what you think, and what you’d like to see next, in the comments.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.