When we redesigned www.HonoluluAdvertiser.com in March, we suffered a large drop in traffic and listened to many complaints that readers couldn't find the stories they wanted, didn't like the new format and found it more difficult to navigate.

In the ensuing months, we made many fixes, updated the site more frequently, added interactive polls, increased the number of blogs and eliminated a good deal of clutter.

The good news is that we've made up all the ground we lost in page views and unique visitors and what's more, the traffic we've seen for Metromix Honolulu, our online entertainment guide, and its 2.4 million hits, has given us our highest totals since January when readers couldn't get enough of all we offered with the University of Hawai'i football team in the Sugar Bowl.

HonoluluAdvertiser.com is always under development and we are constantly looking to make it better. What is working well right now are our online photo galleries, which also hit an all-time record of 2.4 million views, more than 1 million higher than we saw last January during the Sugar Bowl. President-elect Obama's visit to see his grandmother before she died garnered more than 100,000 hits. Multimedia editor Seth Jones and photographer Greg Yamamoto have assembled their favorite photographs and those galleries usually draw 10,000 hits apiece.

We lost a lot of blog traffic after the redesign but are slowly building back up to about 480,000 views per month, nearly half of which are coming from Stephen Tsai and his "Warrior Beat" blog, but Catherine Toth's "Daily Dish" grabs almost 10 percent of the total, followed by Shauna Goya's "Odds and Ends," Wes Nakama's "Prep Talk," Leslie Kawamoto's "Island Tails" and Lance Kwon's "Wassap Wit Dat!" Blogs by Rodney Lee, Kim Fassler, Ed Sugimoto and Kelli Miura all draw more than 10,000 page views per month.

Now that staffers are back to shooting video, we invite viewers to once again watch our locally produced video and what we are offering from our news partner, KGMB9. You may have noticed that we are using video produced by documentary filmmaker Edgy Lee, which we plan on expanding.

Look for more improvements in the coming months as we continue to add to the site. We are also working on making our search engine more effective and to increase the speed of the site.

Thanks for sticking with us and helping us make great gains for Hawai'i's No. 1 news site.

Mark Platte is senior vice president/editor of The Advertiser. Reach him at 525-8080.