[From the diaries by susanhu. Bravo! What a site!] For the past several months we have been working very hard on delivering a new web site and I’m pleased to announce that it has finally been launched!  This site is the next step in our vision of creating a powerful community for consumer activism and education.

We have made some fairly significant changes and we have added quite a few new features.  We have also tried to address some of the usability problems with the old site and while we haven’t nailed all of them we think we’ve taken some good steps.

For those of you not familiar with how we started we have a brief history up which has a link to the original post election DailyKos diary.

More below the fold…
So without further ado, some of the new features:

New Ratings:  Probably one of the biggest enhancements is the addition of new ratings for the environment, labor & human rights, corporate and social responsibility, employment equality, and industry practices.  You can view the methodology to learn how that works in more detail.  Basically these ratings will be determined by articles that you, the reader, submit to us.  We’ve gathered a few of them so far but most companies do not have a rating yet.  You can see these in action in the new company profiles, for example – Wal-Mart’s profile.

Company Profiles:  The company profiles have been completely redone and should now be much easier to navigate.  The first page that comes up presents a summary of important information and then you can navigate to other tabs as you’d like.  Each company profile now features a forum to discuss items specific to that company.  A good example is the Working Assets profile.  Company profiles can also be partially maintained by the community.  We allow trusted users to edit certain portions of the profile such as contact information, categories, alternatives, etc.

Other Improvements:  You’ll also find write-ups on some of the other improvements on the benefits of membership page and the how to find what you are looking for page.  Finally, you can find general information about the site and our mission on the new and improved about page.

We’ll also be launching an ad campaign on the San Francisco Bay Area’s BART starting this week for a month.  Our ads will be on roughly 25% of the system with the purpose of announcing the site.

Please take a minute and check out the new site.  Comments are of course welcome here.  We still have a few bugs to fix, a few pictures on the wall to rearrange but otherwise things have gone smoothly.  We’ll begin working on additional enhancements when we get additional funds.

(cross posted a few places 🙂 )