Playbill On-Line has a great new look.

Starting today, Playbill On-Line's website will undergo a redesign that will keep every bit of the content you've grown to depend upon, but will make it much easier to find and view our stories and features.

The redesign incorporates many of the suggestions readers gave us in our August poll, and takes advantage of advances in Internet technology that will make it much easier to navigate our site.

Playbill On-Line's new home page will load considerably more quickly, and will leave much more space for headlines that will direct you to cool new stories throughout the website.

An index bar will enable you to jump from one area of the service to any other at any time, without having to go back to the home page. Instead of white text on a blue background, which some users found difficult to read, we'll switch to an easy-on-the-eyes black text on a white background. The logo will stay the same, as will most of the banners you have become accustomed to.

The redesign will enable Playbill On-Line to offer even more of our most popular features -- news, interviews, chats, columns. To that end, we have hired a new full-time staff writer, David Lefkowitz, whose work has already begun appearing in Theatre News. His arrival enables Playbill On Line to cover theatre across the U.S. in increasing depth. At the same time, we have created an entirely separate and new Canadian theatre listings section, that will enable us to bring you more information about this dynamic theatre community.

The redesign has been helped, in part, by Playbill On-Line's new sponsor, American Express, whose support of the arts in general and theatre in particular, enters a new era with this redesign.

We all loved the old design, but it became impractical as the site grew, and as our regular users became more web-savvy. The new site will be state-of-the-art, and we hope you'll like it and use it.

-- Managing Editor Robert Viagas