[hotcouponmama]

As Hotcouponworld appoaches it's second anniversary on July 10th, Heidi and I decided it would be appropriate to get the site a little gift. Actually, we think it's a pretty big gift!

If you hadn't already noticed, we've taken the site down a few times in the past few weeks to do some upgrades. We've bumped up to a bigger server to keep the site speeding along for all our members. Then we took the site down again last week to upgrade to the latest Vbulletin software with all the cool new toys (which we're figuring out too and there will be an FAQ topic on how to make it all work).

On July 9th at 9PM pacific time, we're going to take the site down one more time and give Hotcouponworld a facelift. When the site comes back on July 10th, we'll have a brand new look! The new look with be 90% complete on the 10th, with one more piece to integrate before the end of the summer. We're very excited as this has been planned for several months behind the scenes. It's been lots of late nights, chatroom discussions, and phone calls.

Some things that we think are important to note....

The site will be one skin choice from here on in. We think the new design should even work for those who are at work. This keeps us from having to maintain multiple skin patterns and making sure new usertools are properly integrated on each one.

The no-ads subscription will still work, but we have added a new section to the board, a right column with user tools, which aren't ads, and therefore don't turn off. But the usertools are pretty slick and we think you'll like them.

We'll have tested and retested all the links, but that doesn't mean we'll have caught all the little snags that might come up. There will be a thread in the announcement section to help report issues and we'll get them fixed as quickly as possible.

Some of the buttons and tabs will be in different places, but some of the more important ones are now coming out of hiding (like the coupon database) and will be more easily found. And there will be lots of quick reference tabs throughout the pages.

We're proud of the new design and we hope you'll love it as much as we do. We appreciate all of your patience as we've done all these upgrades, but we hope that the forums will be smoother, faster, and easier to understand for newbies and oldtimers alike!

Thanks for continuing to be a part of this great community of friends and deal! Heidi and I appreciate everything each of you do to make Hotcouponworld the best place to hang out online!


Julie