We launched our new homepage on February 22. Since then we’ve had a ton of positive feedback and virtually no complaints. The page loads faster and has a boatload of new features. We have even come to like that vague sense of vertigo from the slider up top of the page. It’s so very China. Anyway, here’s an exhaustive and not at all boring look at everything the home page can do for you.

Add Your Stuff

Up there in the upper right--highlighted in blood red in case it wasn’t obvious enough already—are the keys to the CW castle. Found a new restaurant? Promoting an event? Looking for a girlfriend / language exchange partner? Upload it yourself. Everything you upload (except for classifieds) is immediately visible to the 20,000 people who visit our site every day. Classifieds are carefully managed and everything gets scrutinized by our editorial team to weed out spammers, call girls and Viagra salesmen. Everything you upload is also automatically prioritized for inclusion in the print magazine. We are Beijing’s first and only truly reader-powered magazine--and we take this very seriously.

What’s Hot Now

The main story slider contains the top 5 stories of the day selected by our editorial team. It shuffles through them like a deck of cards. Tired of the shuffle? Click a number and it stops. We actually weren’t so sure how this would go down with readers. So far, nothing but praise. About half of our blog content is taken from the magazine and half is totally original, just in case you are keeping score at home.

Beijing Says is exactly that: what real readers are saying about Beijing’s restaurants, bars, clubs and organizations in real time. Comments go live as soon as they are uploaded and, thanks to our rigorous vetting process, most everyone has learned to use this channel respectfully. Running a prominent reviews channel is A LOT of work (just ask Yelp). But we think it’s worth it.

On the right there you’ve got our Flashbuy deal of the week and a venue that has been selected by our editorial team as one of the best in Beijing. Flashbuy changes every week, the Editor’s Pick changes every day.

Beijing News

Honestly, we’re not super happy with this element. We feel like it doesn’t add much beyond the slider above. But we have some super secret plans for this section which we are working on now. Okay it’s not so secret—expect to see a Twitter-style live feed here in the next month.

Deals Deals Deals

Again, the theme here is “hand selected”. There are literally HUNDREDS of deals on our site at any given time. Hotels especially love to upload every little mooncake voucher giveaway. We comb through the deals and select a dozen or so of the very best. These get displayed right here, rotated daily. Helping you get more bang for your buck, more radicalness for your RMB, more kuaile for your kuai.

Buttons

Our Digital Media development team swears that buttons are absolutely necessary. We are still not sure why, but we believe them. I guess they are sort of like wormholes which can take you into amazing parts of our website which are otherwise totally inaccessible. Click on the one that says “About Us” if you want to see amusing photos.

Classifieds

Pretty self explanatory, no? Toggle through and see the latest ads. There’s some good stuff there, my friends. For example right now you can get a job as an editor with SinoFile, then buy a Phillips DVD player with speakers for RMB700, then move into a 2-bedroom flat near Chaoyang Park for RMB5,600. That’s for real and that’s a good day.

Great Stuff To Do

Again: selection. If we have hundreds of deals, we have thousands of events. We are willing to bet that NO ONE out there has more events than we do. So again, we comb through for the best ones and those get displayed in the Upcoming Events section. This is also fantastic for event organizers. We know you guys often get late confirmations for some pretty rad events. Upload the event, send us the URL (editor@ringierasia.com) and if it’s truly awesome we will get in on the homepage. NO ONE else can do that for you.

Your Beijing Companion

Essentials are articles that are just super useful month after month, year after year and represent our most viewed blog posts. Our step-by-step guide to Taobao, our overview of Beijing’s tea scene and our list of Beijing’s most romantic restaurants never go out of style. These too get rotated seasonally—we need to get Winter Sports off there ASAP! These guides are also aimed more at the tourist market, for people who only have a few days in Beijing and need to know what’s best right now.

Absolute Time Waster

Every couple of days we post a new video. Most of the time it is something completely ridiculous and weird that for the space of 3-5 minutes takes you away from the drudgery of life and the fact that Gchat is still blocked. Right now we have up a video of a dog riding a bike.

Pure Voyeurism

Why? because that’s what the web is all about. Every couple of days we slap up a new gallery of photos into our bottom slider. Sometimes we perv out over all the hot chicks at some DJ party, sometimes we take a look behind the scenes at one of our Fashionista photo shoots, sometimes we peek inside amazing Beijing houses that frankly we can never hope to afford but can covet all the same.

Eat and Drink

And then last but not least we stream our latest restaurant and bar reviews. Did I mention we are the only magazine in town which has a transparent process for reviewing which has been vetted by local F&B pros? Well we do.

What’s Coming Down the Line

2011 is already shaping up to be a monster year for City Weekend online. We just revamped the homepage. We just launched a new family website in Shanghai. We added Click to Call and SMS service on our listings. On April 1 we unveil our brand new voting site for our annual Reader’s Choice Restaurant & Bar Awards. But most exciting—hush hush—is our upcoming iPhone app. We’re at beta right now and it’s looking VERY good. End of March for sure.