JancisRobinson.com takes giant leap

...into the unknown.We hope very much that you like our brand new design. It will not surprise anyone who has been involved in website redesigns themselves that it has taken almost exactly a year, and an enormous amount of effort on the part of many, many individuals, not least Yuriy Letser in the Ukraine (don’t ask) and his team, as well as Julia as usual and also Tamlyn Currin who has been transformed from purple pager to mistress of the tasting note database.

It will of course take some time to get used to, and we are sure that, as usual in these cases, there will be all sorts of teething problems for which we apologise wholeheartedly in advance. (Feedback is always welcome via Contact/Content problems.)

In future the aim is for every article to have its own signature picture but going back into the archive you will find considerable repetition with one image assigned per category as finding a new image for nearly 6,000 articles is too much of a trial to contemplate at the moment. We are also experiencing a little difficulty with the new image system which I fervently hope will be temporary.

But we are absolutely thrilled that we have been able to introduce a number of brand new features on this brand new site which has been built specifically for our needs, not least in response to what you said you wanted in our survey last year:

Much, much more effective navigation and search options.

A major new section called Learn about wine (find it under Resources) where you can find the most amazing amount of information, completely free, about wine regions, grapes and how to buy, taste, serve and store wine.

A new section called Your views where purple pagers can feed in their own tasting notes and reviews of restaurants, bars, hotels, wine stores and food stores. We believe this will prove an extremely valuable resource and urge you all to contribute. We will be announcing a very substantial prize for the best review or set of tasting notes shortly.

For the first time ever all those wonderfully detailed maps from the World Atlas of Wine (latest, 6th edition) are available online – exclusively for the benefit of purple pagers and fully searchable.

Brand new, infinitely more user-friendly and sophisticated formats for the forums.

A special videos and podcasts section to accommodate our growing media library.

They may not all work smoothly at first, but please bear with us as we are convinced the new site will eventually be a huge improvement on the old one and will do our utmost to oil the wheels as quickly as possible. (Note that the ability to view the maps, for example, will depend on your browser (Safari users may well encounter more problems than those who use Internet Explorer or Firefox) and your ability to view Adobe files and your Settings. We’ll try to give as much guidance as possible.

Feel free to add your comments below. We need to weed out the glitches.