Welcome to your new-look Chortle

The smarter new look is designed to make it easier to find the information you want, with all of our content fewer clicks away than it was before.

We’ve also made more of the videos, with some of the funniest clips on the web given pride of place on our front page.

New sections on the front also highlight a chosen gig of the day, while there are also links to the latest comments posted on the Forums.

A major change is to the way we present reviews. We are moving away from the situation where a comedian has just one Chortle review, changed from time to time. Now each profile page will hold a number of reviews, giving our opinion on when we might have seen them in a variety of situations: club nights, theatre gigs, Edinburgh shows, for example.

For the technically minded, there is a whole new raft of RSS feeds. You’ve long been able to take a feed of all our news stories, but now you can take a feed of news relevant to just one comedian, or their tour dates. It means that comedians – or people running fan websites – can integrate Chortle’s listings for that individual act onto their websites, with no need to manually update it. For details of how to embed an RSS feed into a web page, read this.

There have also been some changes that will improve the website further down the line. We’ve made it easier to add profile pages for sketch groups and character acts and link them to the comedians behind them. This will be implemented gradually, so if you’re in a sketch group, please don’t get impatient that you haven’t got a profile page.

Another future development will allow you to personalise some elements of Chortle, and receive emails alerts about your favourite acts.

Minor changes include a new section for our competitions – accessible from the features menu at the top – maps on the venues’ pages and a new panel on the news pages with links to other, similar stories.

The new-look site was built by Winchester-based web design and technology company Powder Blue, who are also responsible for Comedy Bookings, which provides websites and ticketing for a number of the UK’s top comedy clubs, including Jesters, Glee and the Comedy Café.

Published: 15 May 2009