Finally, the time has come to launch our redesigned Web site. All the content work is finished and we are merely waiting on the designers to schedule training for us on how to update it.

I’m really excited about this. I find myself paying more and more attention to our fledgling Web efforts and feel we have a great opportunity here to not only better serve our community but have a lot of fun in the process.

Many of the changes are merely cosmetic, making the site look a little more modern and doing some cool stuff with graphics. But we’re adding some new features that we think will be a lot fun.

Don’t worry, we have no intention of abandoning the high-brow intellectualism that has made this blog so popular, we are just going to combine it with some fun stuff.

Tops on the list is “Top Dog.” I wrote about it last week in the print edition. We are asking readers to send us photos of their dog. We will post three or four each week and allow readers to vote on the “Top Dog.” The winners’ owners will take home cool stuff like a couple movie tickets from Harbour View, or coupons for free food from Chick-Fil-A, and other stuff like that.

Email your pooch’s picture to Managing Editor Douglas Grant at doug.grant@suffolknewsherald.com. Include its name, age, breed, owner’s names, contact information (for the owners, not the dog, and it will not be published), along with a sentence or three about what makes your dog special.

We are just calling it “Top Dog,” but any pet can enter. If you have a cat, ferret, iguana, turtle, horse, pig, whatever, he or she could be “Top Dog.”

We’ll probably have to start it off with photos of employees’ dogs to get the ball rolling. That’s my daughter’s pup, “Bobby Jack,” pictured here and who may be a “Top Dog” contestant down the road. He’s a four-month-old white Pekingese owned by Catherine Prutsok of Suffolk. The only thing I can think of that makes him special is that in the month we have owned him, he has only missed his paper a couple times. That’s the kind of stuff we want to know about your dog, too.

Another new feature of the site eventually will be the ability for the public to start their own blogs here. We are not quite there yet but hope to be in the not-too-distant future. We will have guidelines posted for what’s acceptable and what’s not. I’m looking forward to that, too.

So keep your eye out for the new site and remember to send in that dog’s picture. It’s going to be fun.