Today at noon Eastern/9 a.m. Pacific, Streetsblog will enter a chrysalis state as we prepare to go live with a new site design. For a few hours, we will not be posting as usual. We expect to emerge in our new form about three or four hours later.

The redesign is our first major site overhaul in nearly nine years. We’re very excited about it and expect it will make the reading experience easier, more legible, and more enjoyable. I’ll go into more detail about all the new stuff in a post immediately after we launch the redesign, but for now, I want to give a heads up about major changes that may affect your viewing habits.

Our homepage, www.streetsblog.org, will become a portal for content from all over the Streetsblog universe. If you want to know what’s going on in LA, Chicago, Denver, or anywhere else with a Streetsblog presence, the new homepage will be the place to go.

For Streetsblog NYC readers, this means it’s time to change your bookmarks, your RSS feeds, and your mental image of the URL to visit. The NYC site is moving over to nyc.streetsblog.org (the subdomain will be publicly viewable when the whole redesign goes live). All the old URLs for individual posts will still work, but they will redirect to new locations on the NYC subdomain.

In addition, we are folding content from the Streetsblog Network (usa.streetsblog.org) into Streetsblog USA (usa.streetsblog.org). As with the NYC site, old URLs will continue to function, redirecting to new locations. While we’re retiring the Streetsblog Network domain, we’ll continue its core function of surveying hundreds of sites around the nation for interesting stories about streets and transportation.

Those are the major changes to prepare for. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in a few hours at the brand new Streetsblog.