CNET's home page, rebuilt: Come see what's new

The house that is CNET has given us some amazing tech memories, but we've decided we want to give it a fresh coat of paint, expand the kitchen and refinish the floors. That's a lot of work, and it all starts with our "front door."

There's no question CNET is the market leader in tech news and reviews, which would make it easy to rest on our laurels. Instead, it just drives us to move faster and be better, challenge our assumptions and constantly be ready to reinvent ourselves. Are we writing about the most important things in tech? Check out our new coverage of the Smart Home to see some cool changes we're making there. Are we helping people find the amazing things we write? Download our new Tech Today iOS app to see the perfect example of surfacing the best of our content. Our Roadshow launch was a huge leap in both of those directions -- we wanted to expand and surface our incredible auto coverage. Just yesterday we had this amazing interview with Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO.

And that's just how we've started 2016. For the rest of this year, and beyond, we're excited to have you join our journey. We're going to experiment with both what we write and how we get that content in front of you, always bringing the best of the tech world to your doorstep. Page-by-page we are rethinking our product, and it starts at home -- as in, our home page.

For our desktop visitors, right now you're seeing a brand-new CNET home page, rethought, redesigned, re-everything-ed. Our mobile redesign is still in the works (and already in testing!). So not only are we doing this redesign, but, as you can see from this blog post, we're doing it in a more transparent way.

Further, we're going to share the why behind this -- what are we thinking about, considering, and so on -- as we go on this journey. Yes, we iterated and tested internally, all that good product-y stuff. But what did we want our front page to be? We had three principles driving our redesign:

1. Balance: Finding that sweet spot between content minimalism (allowing you to focus on the most critical info) and our desire to show the depth and breadth of our content. Overall, you'll notice there's a lot less stuff on the page compared with before.

2. Flexibility: In the layout, to tune and ultimately personalize the sections and content based on data from you, our readers. The layout you see now (Highlights, Top Stories, Latest Stories, and so on) is completely flexible.

3. Compartmentalization: Separating our content and our sponsors' content -- each have their own domains. We're moving to using rich media to help our sponsors reach their

Enough of the product-y stuff: Where do you, the reader, come in? Well, you are the most critical stakeholder in this journey, and as such, we want your feedback most of all.

Like it? Hate it? Let us know. This is the first coat of paint, after all -- it's your feedback that will make it both better and real.