If you watch our website carefully, you’ll notice a few changes today. Some of those changes are small, and some are fairly significant, and we’ll be making more changes later in 2011.

We’re making these changes because we’ve received feedback — from our community of users, friends, supporters, and more — that the current set of web properties we have here at Creative Commons isn’t working as well as it could. Our websites have always emphasized using Creative Commons tools, or finding Creative Commons-licensed works. But we haven’t always made it easy to understand exactly how we are making possible the full potential of the internet via open licensing.

Today’s changes mark the first step towards fixing that problem.

The first change you’ll notice is that we’re putting learning about CC into a featured spot on the home page, right next to where you can choose a license for your works.

Another change is that we are making it easy to see that we work across culture, education, and science, instead of putting those as links in a sidebar or even onto different domains, as we have done in the past with education and science. On each of those pages, we put in a “carousel” of users and implementations that draw on our growing repository of CC case studies. All of our work is global across all three domains, so we’ve also updated and prominently feature our international affiliates network page.

Regarding science, we’re redirecting the old Science Commons front page to http://creativecommons.org/science. This is part of our comprehensive integration of science into the core of Creative Commons — on a par with culture and education. We’re still figuring out exactly how to migrate all of the content inside the sciencecommons.org domain, so for now we’re leaving that content up and linking to it from the new page.

We made it easier to find and learn about the licenses themselves, and we made our vision and mission explicit on the About Creative Commons page.

Last, we put a “fat footer” into place at the bottom, so that visitors and experienced CC users could rapidly access key parts of the site without having to dig around and click around in a site map.

This is just the beginning of the process. We’re working on a much more complete site redesign as part of our strategic plan for 2011, but we wanted to get these fixes implemented immediately. For those of you following CC’s progress over the long term, note that our previous significant website refresh came nearly two years ago. We will be tracking the impact of the changes through our website analytics, and we welcome feedback on how you use the site, what you’d like to see, and how you think we can make our website more effective throughout the course of the year.