At Elance, we’re always striving to provide you with a faster, more elegant, and more efficient platform to hire and manage over 100,000 talented online professionals. Keeping that in mind, the internal team here has been hard at work upgrading the site with new elements that will not only update the look and feel but also improve ease-of-use across Elance.

As some of you perceptive elancers may have already noticed, today, we’ve introduced a new, streamlined global navigation with a number of visual and functional improvements.



First, we’ve increased the font sized used in the main navigation as well as added several color elements to make it easier to read and quickly identify where you are currently on Elance.

Secondly, we’ve created a new “Community” drop down menu that can quickly take you to the Blog, Water Cooler, Groups, Elance University, Trust & Safety, and Trends pages. We've also added links to our Facebook and Twitter pages so you can interact with us via our favorite social media sites.

Lastly, we’ve streamlined the navigation by reducing the number of main tabs by moving the Inbox tab to the top right corner by your username, and we've replaced the Explore tab with How It Works to improve clarity. Please keep in mind that the Inbox link will only appear when you are signed in.

Give the new navigation a test drive and tell us what you think by dropping us a line in the comments below. And before we go, one more thing: As you continue working online on Elance, some of you may run across a newly designed homepage. Throughout the next couple of weeks, we'll be testing with a small portion of users several different variations of a new homepage we've been working on, so be sure to keep your eye out for it. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!