Want to help beta test Pacific NW Portal 5.0?

A few weeks ago, I men­tioned that we’re get­ting close to fin­ish­ing the next ver­sion of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal, code­named “New­port”. Our plan is to have it ready to go live next month — most like­ly the week before Christmas.

We are in need of peo­ple to help us test out the new Por­tal, so we can more quick­ly iden­ti­fy any bugs or glitch­es that need to be tak­en care of pri­or to launch. If you’d like to help us beta test New­port, please drop us a line and let us know.

New­port’s major theme is speed. When we set out to mod­ern­ize Pacif­ic NW Por­tal sev­er­al years ago, we made opti­miz­ing per­for­mance one of our biggest pri­or­i­ties… and the results real­ly speak for themselves.

One of the things you’ll prob­a­bly notice about New­port right away is that the site has faster, more pre­dictable load times. The dif­fer­ence is espe­cial­ly notice­able if you’re using a DSL, dialup, or 2G/weak 3G mobile connection.

We’ve also improved usabil­i­ty, acces­si­bil­i­ty, and com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Inter­est­ing­ly, New­port is the first ver­sion of Pacif­ic NW Por­tal to have been joint­ly devel­oped from the ground up on mul­ti­ple oper­at­ing sys­tems, includ­ing Win­dows, Mac OS X, and Kubun­tu. New­port is also the first ver­sion of the Por­tal to have under­gone thor­ough test­ing on mobile plat­forms, includ­ing iOS and Black­Ber­ry OS.

New­port is also jam-packed with new and use­ful fea­tures that we think you’ll enjoy, which make it eas­i­er to stay up to date with the news that mat­ters to you.

Again, if you’d like to be among the first to try the new Pacif­ic NW Por­tal, we invite you to drop us a line and let us know you’re inter­est­ed in help­ing us beta test.