The revamped world front page

We've launched a new world page. Let us know what you think

The Guardian's national carbon calculator. Photograph: David Levene

Mairead O'Connor: Our national carbon calculator attempts to model where the UK's carbon emissions come from. Find out more about how we developed this product and explore the data behind it

The University of Edinburgh's Informatics Forum was the venue for a debate about 'Journalism in the digital age', held as part of the city's International Science Festival.

The Guardian recently hosted a panel event at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. Martin Belam, Information Architect for guardian.co.uk, gave this presentation discussing the impact of technological changes on journalism, and looking ahead at future trends.

Detail from the Guardian Eyewitness app for iPad featuring a Dan Chung photograph of post-tsunami devastation in Indonesia and the thumbnail gallery view feature

A photographic feast offered on Apple's latest highly tactile, visual device

We have this morning launched our new guardian.co.uk front page. There are several reasons for this; some technical, some editorial but all to do with using it as a better window for the vast variety of what we're producing around our network

Get a random page from guardian.co.uk

First Leeds, then Cardiff; now Edinburgh has its own Guardian local blog

guardian.co.uk

Today, we've launched a new UK page.

Like both our politics front and United States front we hope

this layout will provide a clear and intuitive means to track all the latest and most important coverage. The aim is to surface breaking news as it happens in the far-left column, while presenting the main stories of the day in the front and centre of the page.

These new features have already been introduced on a few of our other pages. In the Latest column, which appears to the left-hand side, each story has a link above the headline to the relevant keyword page. It will take you to all our online coverage of the subject, showing the publication date and number of comments. At a glance readers can see what the article is about, when it happened and how much conversation it's generating.

The weather for cities across the UK still appears down the right-hand column of the page, and we have also retained familiar navigation links to guide you to other areas of UK coverage.

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guardian.co.uk

Today, we've launched a new United States page.

Like our politics front, as I explained, we hope

this layout will provide a clear and intuitive means to track all the latest and most important coverage. The aim is to surface breaking news as it happens in the far-left column, while presenting the main stories of the day in the front and centre of the page.

Some of the new features are similar to the ones on our politics page. Each story under Latest is prefaced with a link to its main keyword page. This link will take you to all coverage of that topic, showing when it was published and how many comments it has garnered, so you'll know at a glance what it's about, when it happened and how big a conversation it's generating.

You'll still find the weather for cities across the US down the right-hand column. We've also retained all the familiar navigation links to help you find your favourite United States coverage.

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Following the success of Leeds, our new experiment in local journalism and community coverage has arrived in Cardiff

guardian.co.uk

Welcome to guardian.co.uk's new politics front page. This is the first of several fast-moving news areas that we will shortly be presenting in this format.

As politics builds to fever pitch towards the general election, we hope this layout will provide a clear and intuitive means to track all the latest and most important coverage. The aim is to surface breaking news as it happens in the far-left column, while presenting the main stories of the day in the front and centre of the page.

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Welcome to the new Observer, published from today in four sections – News, Sport, New Review and Observer Magazine

Our new experiment in local journalism and community coverage has launched. Emily Bell explains what the people of Leeds, Edinburgh and Cardiff can expect

A screengrab of the new guardian.co.uk Crosswords front.

I was never inducted into the world of the cryptic crossword. My wife's family were, and when I am with them, there are often perplexing interludes when the family does the crossword together. My father-in-law reads out clues, and the rest of them weigh in with potential answers. To my ears it is just an impenetrable jumble of non-sequiturs. He says something like "Grieve over old bird in mountainous surroundings", and I find myself shouting out random phrases like "sad sparrow", "Baird Mountains", "Henry Plantagenet", "wardrobe?" to try and join in.

So I was rather nervous when approaching the information architecture of the newly re-designed crosswords section of the guardian.co.uk site. I struggle to imagine a more learned and devoted online community than the one that follows our crossword puzzles.

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When The Guardian first made crosswords available interactively on its website, it led the way. Noll Scott, with some assistance from Nic Ford, not only created something ahead of its time, but also set the agenda for accessibility with a version suitable for the blind and partially-sighted.

However, it was back in 1999 that crosswords first appeared on guardian.co.uk and more than a decade on they're distinctly showing their age. In the days when Netscape Navigator 4.5 was one of the most popular web browsers and Internet Explorer 5 had been recently released, using a Java applet was the most effective choice for making an interactive crossword that everyone could use. Browsers have improved sufficiently since that there's now no need to resort to plugins, reducing the barrier for new users and allowing screen readers and mobile browsers to attempt to interpret the crossword.

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