We have had two Web sites for a while -- newsobserver.com and triangle.com. The former has been pretty much a hard-news site. Until a few years ago, it was just a digital version of the paper. It didn't change much during the day. In the predawn hours after the paper started hitting doorsteps, someone would come in and pull onto the site the same stories that were in the paper.

Maybe that was innovative a decade ago, but a couple of years back, we changed things up. We decided that we would break news online, getting over our understandable reluctance to tip off our competitors to what we had learned. We also beefed up the site with lots of multimedia - audio and video - to help tell stories. Our reporters and some of our editors started blogging. It is a much different place than it used to be. But it's still a news site.

Meanwhile, we had triangle.com, primarily an advertising site. About a year ago, we decided to make it more useful to you. Yes, people need the news, but they also need information about where they live, particularly with so many newcomers.

Now newsobserver.com has a good brand name and a lot of traffic. Why not just cram the extra information onto this site, and call it a day?

Well, there are a bunch of reasons, but the one that makes the most practical sense to me is this: As we try to put more breaking news, blogs and multi-media on newsobserver.com, space on the home page gets tight.

You should see us some days, debating over what should get the most prominent play on the home screen. In the old days, we would argue over the print front page only once a day.

Now, regarding the front page of newsobserver.com, we argue about it by the half-minute. Eric Frederick, the managing editor of newsobserver.com, has that hunted look some days of a guy whose inbox is filling up with queries from editors who want to know why their reporters' news isn't played at the home page's tippy top.

So when we decided we were going to deliver a lot more information to the public, digitally, fortunately, there was the old triangle.com site, waiting for its close-up.

The new triangle.com has four channels: Two of them have been around. The Shop channel has our auto, real estate and apartment-rental content. The Share channel is a relative newcomer, created in January as a community publishing site.

The two really new channels are Know and Enjoy. Know is filled with information - about our towns, schools, cultural attractions and more.

An example: Teri Boggess, one of our sports copy editors, pulled together information about recreational sports that is dynamite and hasn't existed in this kind of comprehensive, one-stop format (Go to http://share.triangle.com/know/guide/life).

There are some great databases, and a new searchable crime mapping feature that updates daily (the creation of news researcher David Raynor, Rob Roberts of our multimedia team and Xinxin Liu of our programming staff).

Enjoy is a good place to go to find a good restaurant, learn about the club scene, see what's playing at the movies and more. There's a new and improved events calendar. I encourage you to visit the site and evaluate it.

If you have ideas on how we can make it better, let us know. So far your feedback has been very helpful, particularly from the photo community.