Redesigned From Scratch, HollywoodChicago.com Launches Version 2.0 Publication

CHICAGO – After months of hard work and feedback from scores of people, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the entirely new, entirely redesigned and entirely revamped HollywoodChicago.com.

While we feel the previous format has served you well since inception early in 2007, we’ve heard countless requests for new features and ultimately a more robust publication.

We hope you find the new HollywoodChicago.com a realization of much of what you’ve been requesting. While you can think of it as version 2.0, even this overhaul is a beginning of bigger and better things to come. We already have a list of new ideas and features to implement in rolling phases.

As for what you get with HollywoodChicago.com 2.0, we have content sections instead of just one page that scrolls deeply vertical.

You’ll find content much easier than before and we’ll continue our daily production schedule to inform you of breaking news, reviews and interviews across the Chicago and national film, television, theater and DVD spectrum.

There’s much, much more packed into our 2.0 launch, too! Discussion boards and article commenting play an important part in our relaunch and we’re ready to hear from you often. These have been disabled in 1.0 as we’ve been growing and honing our audience.

Our boards also feature a unique section called “In the Biz”. It’s a home specifically for – you guessed it – people in the business (actors, directors, writers, etc.) to discuss with and meet each other.

You’re now ripe and ready to post on our boards as much as you want. We’ll even reward you for doing so! The new HollywoodChicago.com has built in an interesting and compelling points system.

Every time you post on our discussion boards, you get points. Every time you post a comment in response to an article, you get points. Every time you vote on content (i.e. like Digg or Reddit), you get points. Every time you invite a friend or colleague to the publication, you get points. Points get cashed in for what promises to be fun stuff.

Speaking of friends, the new HollywoodChicago.com is just as much about its community as it is about the information it’s conveying. We’ve built in a buddy list system so you can “friend” your friends (like on MySpace, Facebook or AOL) and you can even specifically track what your buddies are posting on the overall publication.

Speaking of posting on the publication, you can even have your own blog within HollywoodChicago.com! When you get tired of reading us, now we can read you.

You can still read us from the main site, from RSS feeds and from our daily mailing. We have more robust archives, much better search functionality, image galleries, an RSS news aggregator of other sites we think should be on your radar and much, much more with much, much more coming.

By the way, we’ve also been hiring!

In addition to myself (Adam Fendelman), senior staff writer Dustin Levell, staff writer Evan O’Donnell, staff writer Shane Hazen and adviser Lauren Fendelman, we’ve also brought on Chicago staff writer Patrick McDonald and Chicago staff writer Allison Pitaccio. We’ll be adding more writers in the future, too.

So we can move out the old and usher in the new, there was on Jan. 3, 2008 some downtime. We went dark for a short period of time and relaunched on Jan. 4, 2008. Happy new year and we hope you enjoy your new stay here!

~ The HollywoodChicago.com staff