Last week, we quietly launched a newly redesigned Web site for wacotrib.com in what marks a pretty significant chapter in the history of this newspaper.

When Robinson Media Company bought this newspaper last August, one of the more complicated aspects of the sale was the transfer of the Web site from Atlanta-based Cox Newspapers to the Robinsons.

Needless to say, it has been one of the most complex projects that I have ever been associated with. It was so complex that it took three months to accomplish and we’re still not finished.

The Internet is such a different beast from our traditional print product and, like anything, it comes with its very own language — much of it Greek to me.

Truth be told (and don’t tell my bosses), I often found myself making key strategic decisions about the Web site during meetings with a group of tech experts who explained things I didn’t always understand.

Mostly, I put my faith in God and a wonderful consultant that the Trib hired from Atlanta, John Reetz, and just hoped that I was making the right decisions.

One of the simplest examples of how different the tech world is for me involves today’s column.

Every time we roll out a new product for our readers, it’s second nature for me to want to introduce the product ahead of time in one of my columns.

In this case, I was warned not to do so ahead of time. Technology is so fickle that I could have ended up introducing something that might not have worked.

Fortunately, our new Web site rolled out with few hitches and the feedback has been mostly positive.

So now I can write a column letting loyal readers know about something with which they’re probably already familiar.

Our aim was to deliver a simpler, cleaner look to our Web site.

We felt that our old Web site had a somewhat cluttered feel to it and that a lot of the features on it might have been lost on some readers because those features were buried somewhere near the bottom of our home page or elsewhere.

Our hope is that by simplifying the look of our new Web site that we can highlight some of the offerings that readers may not have known existed.

There’s a lot that we’re proud of with this Web site and I encourage you to look around.

For one, our wacotribcars portion of the Web site has a lot of wonderful features that should make shopping for cars and learning about the features of the various models a fun experience.

I’m particularly proud of the sports coverage on our new site. We contracted with one of the nation’s premier sports Web content providers to build what I think is an impressive volume of sports content. Ultimately, it’s a sports statistical junky’s dream that in many cases is updated in real time as games are being played.

Perhaps the biggest topic of complaint is actually something we had anticipated: our popular slide shows.

Waco loves our slide shows. Compared to many other newspapers around the country, we get an unusually high volume of traffic for our slide shows.

The big complaint is that readers have to adjust the page each time they forward to a new slide.

That’s a complaint I had personally as we got closer to launch. Our technical people agreed this would be a priority fix once we launched our site.

We’re now working diligently to make that fix, with the objective of making our slide shows as popular and easy as they can be, playing on our past technological strides and breaking new ground.

I strongly encourage you to check out wacotrib.com and let us know what you think. There’s a button right now on our home page that allows you to easily send feedback. You’ll be joining many others who have already done so.

While I’m still all-thumbs when it comes to the high-tech aspects of all this, our dedicated online team is not. We’ll work to fix any problems you spot. And take heart. We have many more exciting Web features to come.

Editor Carlos Sanchez can be reached at 757-5703 or csanchez@wacotrib.com.