Every evening when the hour hand passes five, most of us leave our jobs for relaxation and time with family. For the more than four hundred years that newspapers have been dropping onto doorsteps, five o'clock has meant something different for a few folks. Starting around this time, journalists and designers get to work designing tomorrow's front page.

It all starts with questions. "What happened today?" "What could happen tonight?" "How important is this story?" "Do we have great pictures that we want on our front page?" "What design and accompanying stories will really capture the history of today?" When everyone is comfortable with the answers to those questions, folks get started drawing the layout of the front page. By early morning, a designed cover is complete and ready to catch each coffee spill.

That's not the case with online news. Every news site looks pretty much the same each day. Business, Sports, Politics, Entertainment – aside from the stories in these sections, the design of the sections themselves is pretty uniform and, well, boring. As someone who has worked in software for a decade, I have often described this as every news site looking like one big database query.

Msnbc.com is in the midst of a major period of expansion, highlighted by the redesign of our site.

Last month, Newsvine.com became part of our family and we announced a new sports site in partnership with NBC Sports.com, this month we launch a major new site design, and in the coming months will be exciting developments in our video user experience.

That’s an ambitious agenda for a company of our size and if you imagine a dedicated team of programmers, editors, designers, and managers working tirelessly to make it happen, you would be right. Despite the immense resources of msnbc.com’s parent companies, we fund ourselves and rely on a remarkably small and skilled group of employees to create the site you see. At msnbc.com, the cultural fusion of software engineers who never stopped working nights after they left college and journalists obsessed with breaking news 24/7 has created an environment where hard work is the norm. But hard work has its limits and with this redesign come some very smart behind-the-scene innovations that will vastly simplify how we create new features and future versions of the site. We will now have the ability to change almost everything you see in a fraction of the time and effort previously required.

Will that mean more rest and relaxation for the people of msnbc.com? I doubt it. The teams here have a long list of ideas they are eager to implement, including some great suggestions from many of you. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

I look at this design overhaul, as store-front as it may seem, as underwriting for a bigger promise we want to make: Better journalism. In a number of ways, behind the scenes, this design encourages that, if not demands it. Editors and producers will be expected to sift, leverage, sort, weigh and package the news with more care and more skill, and the payoff should accrue to the user. We’ve given our editors a brighter flashlight, a sharper knife. Of course, the verdict will be yours.

There are good and valid reasons to redesign msnbc.com. Many of those reasons are technical since they are about making the site more "searchable." While better search is appealing, it doesn’t light my fire. For me, it’s the intellectual equivalent of cleaning the house. I’ve known we should do it, but I’ve been reluctant because it’s too easy to find more interesting things to do.

I'd also have to admit my reluctance was, in part, due to fear. Redesigns can cut the wrong way for a photojournalist. I’ve seen redesigns that have sent good publications down a path of cookie-cutter templates that force bad visuals onto front pages. This happens because of efficiency and workflow concerns. I understand the value of those things, but I believe they drive too many decisions. There was a day about six months ago when I was wrestling with this idea. I desperately didn’t want a cookie-cutter, highly-templated redesign at msnbc.com, but then I remembered that it had already happened. We’d been living with it for years, but like a good workhorse we’d learned to accept our restraints and our blinders. Let me explain…

“The news menu fly-outs now work in Safari mac/win and Camino.” This was a recent update in our issue-tracking database by one of our star coders, letting everyone know that the left-side navigation will work as expected on Macintosh browsers when we re-launch the site. It doesn’t sound like much, but that simple status change represents a sea change for msnbc.com.

It’s no secret that in years past, we haven’t always been the best online citizen when it comes to playing nicely with others. Conspiracy theories abound (Microsoft, purveyor of Windows and Internet Explorer, is one of our corporate parents, after all) but the facts are far more simple.

The vast majority of our users come to msnbc.com on a Windows PC with Internet Explorer, thanks in no small part to our friends at MSN.com, the default homepage when so many of you first click that blue ‘e’ on your desktop. Fully supporting Internet Explorer, while giving alternative browsers a short shrift was, quite simply, a matter of expedience for the first decade of our site’s existence.

Get a first look at an all-new msnbc.com homepage. How soon is ‘coming soon’? More on that here in the week ahead. Any first impressions? Post your comments!