The first major round of the NetSquared site redesign is now live, but as you click around the site you might be thinking, "Where's the beef?"

Much of this upgrade was focused behind-the-scenes and not as much on the side of the site you see; though that will flip-flop in the next round in a couple weeks.  Below is a run through of what we've implemented so far that you can see, an overview of the dramatic back-end improvements we've made, and a preview of what is still to come in the first half of December.

To review the blog post series about the redesign, click here.

What You See

We've fixed up the header image, implemented new styling for sub-pages in the sidebar, generally improved the styling of the blog and sidebars, and given the Project Gallery the first phase of its dramatic makeover.

Our goal with the changes to the Project Gallery was to make it much easier to sort / sift through the thousands of projects listed there.  To that end, you can now re-order the projects through some easy buttons at the top of the page (more options are coming soon) and browse a short summary of the project through expanding listings before jumping to the full entry. Give the Gallery a quick tour and let us know what you think (just post your comments at the bottom of this post, or email us). 

Finally, you can now use your OpenID on NetSquared.org!

What You Don't See (The Geeky Part)

Before this round of improvements, the site was running on Drupal 5 and had a slew of modules that needed updating. Over the past few weeks, we removed and cleaned up legacy data from dozens of modules dating back to Drupal 4.6, dramatically improving the underlying structure of the site. To make future maintenance of the site easier, we cut down to about ten major contributed modules, a handful of utility modules, a couple of custom modules, and a custom theme.

You also don't see the upgrades to our voting system yet - both because we're still working on them and because we don't have any open Challenges on the site right now. We'll be launching the new voting mechanism before our next Challenge goes live and will be providing you with a walk through of the user experience as soon as it's been implemented.

What You Will See

This round of updates was roughly 90% back-end and 10% front-end; the next round you'll see will be the opposite. Now that we've established a good foundation, we'll be focusing on improving a number of items that have been raised by the community through earlier calls for feedback and the blog series that relate to the look, feel, and user experience on the site.

This next round will include, among other things:

• adding a tabbed box to the top of the homepage with quick links to the most-visited topics and newest content on the site,
• adding a "Think Tank" section to the site with links to white papers, blog posts, and tools we've developed,
• creating a unified, standard-format calendar for all NetSquared Local / NetTuesday meetups around the globe,
• adding the ability to sort by geography and cause area in the Project Gallery,
• adding a handy left-sidebar set of tools to create projects, enter projects into challenges, and take other project-related actions to the project galery,
• adding a number of left sidebar elements to make navigation even easier inside of the Blog and the Project Gallery.

A number of smaller improvements and bug fixes are also on the agenda, but for those of you who are feeling underwhelmed by this upgrade, please know that what we've done so far has largely been improvements that you can't see. Ideas or suggestions on what this next upgrade should include that we haven't mentioned above? Please let us know!

*Update: What We Know is Buggy

We've got a growing set of items on our punch list; below are things that we know are buggy and are actively working to fix.

• some funky characters are showing up in the text of pre-redesign pages, posts, and projects,
• the "Projects" link is sometimes disappearing from the homepage,
• spammy blog posts are not disappearing for anonymous users,
• autopath is not automatically generating aliases for new blog posts