If you are a regular visitor, you will probably have noticed by now that we have a new website. So welcome to the new, improved old.adamsmith.org! We were the first UK think tank on the web back in 1998, and were the first to launch a blog a few years later. The internet was then and remains now a key part of our strategy for promoting liberty, and I hope the new site reflects the central importance we place on our online presence.

The most obvious changes from the old website are cosmetic. And I hope you'll agree with me that our designers / developers at Deeson have done a wonderful job in making the site look, well, rather gorgeous. I should also say that they've been a pleasure to work with, and that I'd have no hesitation in recommending them for other projects.

But there are functional changes too - the new front page has been designed to work much better as an aggregator of our work, as well as to more effectively flag up the highlights of our online (and offline) activity.

Moreover, the search function here represents a giant leap forward from our previous websites. There's still work to be done tagging a lot of our old content - and we hope to take this as an opportunity to digitise and upload far more of our publications archive than has previously been possible. But as this work progresses, I hope that old.adamsmith.org will become a better and better resource for people trying to find out more about libertarian and free market ideas and policies.

Sam has already mentioned the changes we've made to the research section of the site, so I won't rehash that here. Suffice it to say that I'm confident that the new prominence given to our articles / think pieces - which fill the gap between the up-to-the-minute commentary on our blog and the more technical analysis of our reports - will prove a great success.

Needless to say, this new site is just one of a whole host of exciting developments currently in the pipeline at the Adam Smith Institute. This isn't the place to lay out our plans for 2012, but I can say that the next 12 months will see us both publishing an array of big, new ideas and focusing more tightly on a series of core campaigns where we believe we can make a tangible difference to the public debate.

Finally, it is inevitable that various bugs and broken links will come to light over the next few days. If you spot anything amiss, please let us know by emailing sam@old.adamsmith.org.