It's Monday morning, October 15th, and after weeks of testing, we updated the site for everyone. Let me tell you why we made these changes (which took months to conceive and implement).

First, our goal is to get you the information you want quickly and efficiently. Yes it's true that we get paid by advertisers to show their ads, so if you visit more pages we get paid (a teenie tiny bit) more. However, we'd rather have you love the site and find what you need quickly than make an extra cent off of you. So we put a search bar right on the menu at the top of the page to allow you to find any state or resort quickly. Also, if your search has only one result (i.e. you type in "Vail"), we'll take you straight to that page instead of giving you a list of search results with only one result. Simple, yet cool. We also made the site a bit lighter with more white space and cleaner navigation. Finally, we spent most of the summer building a brand new server environment. It's geeky, but all you should notice is that the site is faster and won't go down when big storms are approaching and tens of thousands of people are on the site looking for the latest forecast.

A few more big updates...

The BIG NEWS is that we added comment/discussion areas on each Daily Snow post and also for each mountain location. Please post updates and pictures about snow (is it snowing? how's the snow? etc) and let's get the conversation going! Our forum area is good for this as well, but we wanted to bring the discussion to you and to the pages you visit most often. Again, speed and simplicity. We know you probably don't head into the Forum that often, so this way you'll see the latest chatter right on your favorite pages.

You'll see official Winter Storm Watches, Advisories, and Warnings on each mountain's page below the forecast. Don't see them now? That's because (sadly) there are no Watches/Advisories/Warnings. These are issued by the National Weather Service.

We added a "News" section where we'll be posting articles throughout the season.

It's now easier to stay in touch with simpler email signup and site registration. It's all free...we just want to provide you with the information you want, simply and quickly.

We have a great mobile site as well! Just head to opensnow.com on your mobile phone and things look great. (and yes, we're working on apps, but these take more time and are more expensive compared to building a great-looking mobile site).

While most of the changes involved cleaning things up or adding features, one thing we did remove was LiveSnow because it wasn't well integrated into the site. We do think it's INCREDIBLY VALUBLE for people to post updates and pictures of what's going on at the mountain, so that's why we started the discussion/comment areas right on The Daily Snow and for each mountain. You can even post pictures in these comments as well (even from your mobile phone, though for iPhone you need the lastest software, iOS 6). Really, we've just shifted LiveSnow from a stand alone feature to being a part of the most popular pages on the site.

We hope you like the changes and are excited for future updates! If you have any suggestions or see something that's not working correctly, please email us at [email protected].

JOEL GRATZ & ANDREW MURRAY