Surprise!!!

Welcome to the new and improved (I hope) vancouverjazz.com home page. It's been at least four or five years since there has been a major redesign of the site's home page. Not that a redesign was necessary. The page worked well, I think and I have, in fact, received a fair bit of positive feedback over the years, praising the simple and easy to navigate page, and the site in general. So why the change? There are a few good reasons. The blog format makes it easy to add fresh content to the home page in just a few minutes. Although the Forum has served well as a place that anyone can post news or information, or discuss and debate issues, I think it adds another dimension to have a place right on the home page to add stuff that's not really intended for discussion, although there is a "Comment" feature. News, commentary, pointers to other items of interest on the web, etc., will appear here. I also hope to enlist a few other contributors to this blog. This is not intended to be a platform for myself only. Another bonus is the RSS feed. You can now subscribe to vancouverjazz.com and stay up-to-date on new items via your favourite newsreader. And lastly, this blog will bring more readers to the home page and advertisers can count on higher visibility for their banner ads. I'm hoping that will result in a few more ads, thereby increasing income for the site so that I can add more stuff, like podcasts, for example. I don't really know where this will go. I've been playing around with this setup for about a month, hindered no end by at least three weeks of that godawful flu that's been going around. (I think I may be over it but there's no telling with this one. It has a tendency to sneak back on ya when you're sure it's dead. I've dubbed it The Terminator.) I'd meant to have this in place sooner. Also, it's not quite done. There are still a few tweaks I'm fiddling with (the alignment of ads in the left column is driving me crazy!) but what the hell, let's just go live and see what happens. I welcome and encourage your feedback either in the Forum, or give the Comment link below a try. (Note that you'll need a Google or Blogger account to post comments.)