Hey! The site looks different today

Welcome to the new version of blogTO. Yesterday, we flipped the switch on a new design for the site. But the changes go far beyond a new look and feel. For the last few years we've been working on building a completely new infrastructure for the site that will allow us to cover and share news and info about the city in entirely new ways.

So what's new?

At the core of what we've built is a new way for you to interact with all the content you see on the site. It's now simple to save articles or best of lists for future reference, save restaurants or shops you might want to visit or save events that you might want to attend. 

You can manage it all through your personalized dashboard.

Throughout the site we've added buttons to areas to make it seamless to share and save this content. For instance, we've reformatted the way we write about upcoming events so that you can easily add an event to your profile or calendar.

In the restaurants, cafes and other sections where we write about local businesses, we've made it easy to rate a place, create a to-do list of places you want to visit or keep a list of favourites for easy reference.

You can also now share photos that you've taken at places around the city. For business owners, you can keep the page that highlights your business fresh by uploading photos of your new menu, interior design or other updates.

Looking to get to know the city better? We've also updated our neighbourhood pages so you can discover all the great places to visit in Kensington Market or find the perfect cafe in Leslieville.

We've also made it easy to search for restaurants and other local businesses. You can browse by neighbourhood or look up places by TTC subway stop, address or what's nearby your current location.

You can also filter results so you only see places that have landed on one of our Best of Toronto lists.

Too busy to check the site all the time? We've rolled out 4 new email newsletters that you can opt-in to receiving to get the latest news, find things to do, win stuff or participate in one of our photo challenges.

And there's more....

We're just at the early stages of what we're hoping to do with the site. While you may have come to know us for our lists, restaurant reviews or event listings, we're also changing the ways we create content in general, including our coverage of daily news and local stories that matter. 

And to our app users, we haven't forgotten about you. Our completely rebuilt iPhone app is coming out very soon and Android users, we'll finally have something for you too.

Got feedback or suggestions?

We get that changing something isn't always a popular move so if you have any feedback or suggestions, or just want to report a bug or error please reach out to us.

The site is freshly lauched and we understand not everything is functioning 100% as it should yet. We're working hard to get out all the kinks to optimize your experience with the site.

A final thank you

We wouldn't be here without all of you, so thanks for taking the time to read about what we've been up to. A special thanks also has to go out to the team at Studio Function for the new look, Hipo for the many lines of code, Kevin for the server magic, the many freelancers we work with and our team of editors, writers and photographers for their passion and dedication to the site.

by via blogTO