Welcome to the new Guardian US

Built with our journalism at its heart, the new Guardian website has been conceived to give you, our readers and collaborators, the best possible way of discovering, engaging with, and sharing our stories.

We have started with the basics: we want to provide you with a delightful reading and viewing experience, no matter which device you are using.

About half of our traffic now comes from people using mobile devices, and so we want the act of reading or viewing the Guardian’s journalism to be consistent, familiar and pleasurable regardless of the size of screen being used.

We want to make it compelling for you to engage with our journalism, to discuss with us, share it with others and then to easily find more articles, videos, live blogs, interactives or photo galleries that are relevant to you.

Globally, around a third of all visits to the Guardian contain a view of the homepage which is why we also spent many months on completely rethinking the function and design of our homepage, and of our section homepages such as opinion or technology.

From studying how our readers are using our site every day, we realised that the Guardian’s homepage has to fulfil two main functions at once: it has to make it very easy for you to quickly scan the current news agenda and it has to provide you with intuitive ways of discovering the enormous breadth and depth of our award-winning journalism from around the world and across a wide range of topics and authors.

Homepages of news sites often are not structured in ways that would cater to typical user journeys, but rather they mirror the internal organisation of a newsroom into sections and departments.

After many months of interviewing our readers and after studying what was really happening on our homepages each day, we decided to take a very different route and have created a new set of building blocks which we call “containers”.

Each homepage and each article page is made up of various such containers. These do exactly what their rather technical name suggests. They ‘contain’ words, pictures, videos, graphics and data. Our editors can group them together flexibly and within minutes by topic, by story type, by tone or by importance.

So instead of building a page according to a rigid template - news here, features there, big picture, little picture and so on - our editors can use flexible containers to build a representation of what is important about each and every day. And within each container, our editors can easily assign different levels of visual volume and different styles to each story.

Our new homepage also gives you new visual clues about the relative importance that each story has and about the tone of a story: a new and easy to learn colour scheme indicates whether you are about to click on a news story, an opinion piece, a feature, a review or a piece of analysis.

Containers can move and flow through the page as the news agenda shifts. They can highlight breaking news, present a multi-part investigation or guide you towards a new columnist we’d like to introduce you to, an enticing image gallery or an entertaining video. They bring our editorial voices to life in more ways than ever before.

Our editors can also take any container from a homepage and make it part of an article page so that it can enhance your reading experience.

Many new design features have been included in the redesign: from new video and gallery pages, new-look live blogs that balance at-a-glance summaries with constant updates, to a new typeface and a new iconography.

The navigation bar at the top and bottom is now consistent across the site, making it easier to learn and find the Guardian’s different sections. When you click the “all sections” menu at the top right of this page, you can see all of the Guardian’s sections and all their sub-sections in one joint view.

We’re immensely grateful for the 26,000+ comments we received during the beta test of this new site, whether in person through testing sessions, through online user surveys, or comments posted in our discussion threads and via social media. We’ve listened to what you’ve had to say – and we’ve developed the site with your thoughts and input front of mind.

Of course we can’t please everyone. But we hope, over time, all our readers will appreciate the changes we’ve made and understand the reasons why we’ve made them: to offer the best possible experience of Guardian journalism and to deepen our relationship with you, our readers.

We will continue to ask for your feedback. This launch today isn’t the end of our journey, it is just the beginning and our team of designers, journalists, engineers and developers can’t wait to add more functions over these next months to come.