Welcome to the new look English-language home of the Economic Observer.
We hope you like the new design.
In addition to overhauling the appearance of the site, we're proud to introduce a few new features that we believe will make reporting on the Economic Observer both more timely and comprehensive. Our aim is for the site to become an essential source for those with an interest in tracking developments in Chinese economics, business and politics.
New Features:
The Headline Scanner offers you succinct translations of the best financial and economic reporting being produced in China. Every day we'll scour the Chinese-language web and summarise the day's most interesting headlines. We've also added a quick shortcut to the google translate function for those who want to read more.
Our Voices channel contains reader comments that have been culled both from our own forum and the big bad world of China's BBS and discussion boards. These quotes will help to keep you abreast of how the latest news is being discussed in Chinese-language forums.
Briefs aims to go direct to the Chinese-language source to give you all the facts about exactly what's going on at the earliest moment possible and to place the news in the context of recent developments.
There are also more interactive features and we encourage you to not only comment on our reports and translations, but also to vote in our weekly poll, explore our interactive graphics and to become a part of the conversation.
The new site also has more images. More multimedia graphics. More up-to-date information.
Hopefully, you'll recognise some familiar features too.
The high quality translations from each week's paper will still appear and are still divided into the same familiar subject categories - Finance and Economics, Industry and Society - although,in a minor tweak, we have changed the Politics and Policy channel to Law and Policy.
We still offer Photo Essays from around the country based on the images of EO photographer Luo Jian, original videos, our regular in-depth Special Features and a translation of the editorial from each week's newspaper.
We've also maintained our digest of the each week's issue and will continue to upload an Issue Wrap to the site every Monday afternoon.
Keen-eyed readers familiar with our Chinese-language site, will notice that the new-look site has many features in common with our elder sibling. This is a deliberate move that aims to emphasize the close ties that exist between the two websites.
Please let us know what you think of the site and pass on any suggestions you might have as to how we can improve it. Feel free to leave a comment on this post or to e-mail panglei@eeo.com.cn.
We also ask for your patience over the next few days and weeks as we continue to take down the digital scaffolding and deal with the various bugs that are likely to emerge.
Finally, thanks to all who have contributed to the design and implementation of the site. Special thanks to Nick Ray who did most of the initial design work and also provided much-needed advice throughout the process of getting the new site up and working. Thanks also to Lam Li for useful suggestions and assistance in conveying design ideas. A special xie xie to the EO web team and especially Zhang Zhipeng for his patience and hard work.
English Editorial Team
Beijing – July 28, 2009
