When we set out to redesign our site, we first spent time talking to our current users and thinking about how best to serve them. Naturally, we were very interested to hear what people thought as they visited the new site for the first time last week. 

Here are excerpts from the email and Tweets we received, from the hits:

• “@Pew_Internet organizes research in multi ways, bite size and by topics, great.”
• “Pew reports in html on their AWESOME new site”
• “Topic nav…makes it easy to find the information we’re looking for.”
• “My favorite part of your new site is the ‘participate‘ section. All that research is paying off!”

To the misses:

• “congratulations on the new Pew Internet site, but you’ve given your RSS subscribers a 404 in the process.” (The RSS is now fixed.)

And those who encourage us to stretch even further:

• “Fantastic, love it. Just find a way to enable user comments to enable 2way conversation.” (For now we rely on email, Twitter, and the good old telephone to communicate with our audience, but we are interested in exploring options for on-site communication.)
• “more SPSS files of data sets. Currently using 2008 civic engagement & games data set 4 a class. More choices [would be great]” (We post data sets as soon as we have published the final report that will come out of a survey. This is a policy that has been in place since October 2007 and came as a direct result of audience feedback.)

Please continue to send us your comments, questions, and bug reports via email or on Twitter. And if you really get stuck, we do answer the phone.