Welcome to the new Ars Technica! Come on in, take off your coat, and check out the fantastic improvements we've made to the Ars Technica experience. Ars 5.0, as we've come to call it, is our most ambitious and effective redesign to date. We hope you'll agree.

Why, oh why, change something in a universe that never changes (/sarcasm)? Were the drapes tattered, was the paint peeling? Here are the highlights:

A lighter, faster experience

In the past year, the number of monthly visitors to Ars has doubled, and many of those visitors are coming 3-8 times/day. Our servers were finally starting to sweat, get sluggish, and sometimes even crash. Unacceptable! Job #1 was to boost performance.

We've left behind Mubble, our custom CMS of 4+ years, and moved in with the fine folks at Movable Type. Extensible, fast and easy to use--we were ready for the move and MT was ready for us in a way that was not feasible in '04 or even '07. There has been a tremendous amount of work on the backend to make this possible. Of course, this change meant that we would also need to revisit our aging hardware setup. Who doesn't like new hardware?

We sat down with ServerCentral and reinvented our server cluster, with a focus on redundancy and speed rather than cutthroat cost efficiency. Located near our Chicago HQ, ServerCentral has very reliable, very robust bandwidth, as we've learned over our four years with them. We're going to be writing about this in more detail in the coming weeks, but we settled on three Dell PE2950s, each with dual 5410 quad core Xeons, 8GB of RAM, and RAID 5 6x73GB storage arrays. Each physical server is running VMWare, which are currently split out into four instances: two lighttpd front ends, a database server--MySQL, and the Movable Type application server (which also hosts Civis, our new login system). We're currently making plans to double this amount soon as we launch additional dynamic service for our readers. For an OS, we're using Debian all around, with load balancing courtesy of a pair of Barracudas, and kept tidy by a Fortigate firewall. We continue to rock on with CacheFly, our CDN.

We also knew that we needed to slim our pages down quite a bit. Our old design was image heavy thanks to all the rounded corners and polish. With the new site, the preponderance of images we do serve will be associated with stories, and not the design. And thanks to increased CPU overhead again, we can gzip our content before serving it to you. All in all, Ars is lighter and faster than before. You can't appreciate the full effects just yet, because we have tweaking to do now that the site is live, but hopefully you can already tell the difference.

Another factor adding into the increased speed is that we've actually eliminated 33 percent of our ad placements. At a time when other sites are cramming more and more ads on their pages, we went in the opposite direction. We now have two major display ad positions instead of three, and I hope you appreciate our efforts to keep things reasonable. None of you work for free, and we can't either. But we don't want to follow other sites and explode advertising everywhere just because of an economic downturn.

Better navigation, better organization

Keeping up with us has been a challenge. We know because many of you told us this in our last user survey. So we studied the site and came to a realization: our content was scattered across the site like a shotgun blast. Let's give an example from the area of gaming.

A review of a hot new release would be in our Reviews section, but a minireview would be listed on Opposable Thumbs. Breaking news about a development in the console world would be on the front page news section, while an article about cleaning your PS2 would be in our Technical Articles section. Horrible! And when write-ups covered multiple topics, such as a review of an iPhone game, we didn't know how best to place it. Gaming? Reviews? Apple? And the same was true for Open Source, Science, Business IT, Tech Policy, Microsoft, and so on.

We've now fixed that. Our top stories will still be listed on the front page of Ars, and culled from all over the site. But beyond the front page, all content is being regrouped by topic. For instance, someone who reads Infinite Loop will now see listings for all Apple-related content there: reviews, shorter "blog" posts, original reports, guides, and more. And should hell freeze over and Apple build an Xbox 360 into the side of a Mac Pro, you'll see pointers to that story in both the Microsoft and Gaming sections.

This marks a significant change for us, but it's one that we know we must make. The navigation bar bears the marks of this change. In the top row are the sections, generically described, and in the second row we break out the genre, e.g., News, Features, Reviews, and Guides. This means you are never more than one click away from any major section, and no more than two clicks away from any major subsection. We wanted this navigation to be easy, because our old "Journals box" simply couldn't be modified to suit everyone's need. The headlines were too small, many of you told us you didn't realize it was there for months, etc. Now thanks to improved navigation and/or RSS, you can find our content more easily than ever.