In 2004, SeattlePI.com embarked on an ambitious plan to implement a "dayparting" strategy. Four times every weekday, the look, feel, content and functionality of our home page changed dramatically. The idea, based on a study that sent shockwaves through online publishing, was that people use the Internet for different things at different times of day, and a site had to adapt to that reality if it wanted to build an around-the-clock audience.

Good theory, and we saw some gains in traffic early on. But, two years of hard-won experience made it clear that we can't be all things to all people all the time. People might want to play games or shop or read celebrity gossip, but they weren't coming to our site for that (well, maybe for the gossip).

SeattlePI.com is, first and foremost, a news site. That's how people see us, that's what they expect of us and that's what brings them to us in the first place. Over the past year, we've seen significant growth in traffic to our news content and our blogs (which, aside from this one, are written by reporters and tend to be pretty "newsy"), and we're focusing more resources on building them up.

So, we're moving away from dayparting. We'll still change the content mix on the home page constantly, but we won't be changing the overall design or user experience anymore. In the next few weeks, we'll switch to using a single home page layout around the clock that, we hope, incorporates the best features from the variant designs we've used the past two years.

Meanwhile, we'll stick with the news-oriented layout that we've been using between midnight and 1 p.m. on weekdays. We've redesigned it a bit for the Seattle Seahawks' history-making playoff run (which, hopefully, will last beyond tomorrow). Interest in the team is at an all-time high -- at least, among our users -- and we wanted to make it easier for people to find all of our Seahawks content when they come to the site.