The new site features a completely different and vibrantly contemporary look. There is a host of new features, including the introduction of Gabby Sanderson's I'm With The Band blog, access to Hot Press twitter feeds, more integrated content – and a whole lot more besides. The look itself is the first part of a multi-phased development which encompasses development of huge additional tranches of content.

"The final run-in to a complete redesign is always tricky," Hot Press' director of publishing Duan Stokes said. "There was a lot of testing and tweaking to be done, but the new look meets all our expectations. I think people are going to love it. The design crew have done a brilliant job. They have every reason to be proud. However we'll be going through a minor teething process - there are almost 200,000 items of content on hotpress.com so to get it all across to the new schema will take a few days. The site itself has been generating 150,000 unique visitors a month – and rising. We got involved producing internet based content in the very early days of the web (1995!) and it's remarkable to see how far the technology has come in that time!"

"I thing the cleaner look, greater level of accessibility and increased volume of free material will inevitably lead to a higher level of activity on the site," Stokes said. "There are further additions to the editorial menu on the way, and we'll be making additional adjustments to the deeper layers on the site, but already there is a lot more for members of hotpress.com, and casual users alike, to get their teeth into."

This week also saw the release of an exclusive acoustic version of Jamie Lawton's 'Last Time', which will be downloadable free exclusively on [link]www.hotpress.com/jamielawson[/link]