First of all, this isn't the same thing as the What's New page. Basically, What's New is (or should be) a short summary of changes on Scuk, listed on a daily basis. (And, of course, a list of what's up with Liz and Uma. But that's just 'cause we're narcissistic.) The editor's letter, on the other hand, will be written whenever we undergo some major changes in any aspect of Scuk. Its purpose is to expand on them: what the changes are and why we feel they're worth making.

What we're changing, mainly, is the layout. Over the next week or so we plan to reorganize Scuk, including adding a navigational toolbar on each page, to make sure you know where you are and where you can go. We'll also be adding a complete, organized, and easy-to-read site map, so you can see the layout of all the subdirectories and pages on Scuk if you do get confused. We're doing this because we realize that we have a ton of pages in different categories at Scuk, and a lot of them have almost nothing to do with the others. (For example, our fiction has little to do with, say, Shimelle Laine's resume.) Our hope is that these changes will allow you to navigate our site with increased ease. We also plan to put a link to email us on every page, and add a feedback form, to make sure you can easily reach us with your comments.

We've also introduced something completely new to Scuk: it's called Scuk Surprises. A Scuk surprise is a page of things we think are cool (ranging from the story of Scuk to, later (we hope), sound files of some of Uma's songs). Scuk Surprises are called such because their location isn't announced, and they can't be found even on the sitemap. Rather, they're hidden--several pages selected randomly throughout the various sections of Scuk will have a link at the bottom to a Scuk surprise. Click on it to find yourself on the page with whatever we think is cool. We're adding this because we think it's a fun way to enjoy whatever we're putting in the Surprise page, and because we hope it's a cool way to encourage people to surf through a few areas on our site that they normally might not visit.

Finally, in this letter we'd like to address the issue of feedback. Frankly, we've gotten extremely little, and this is very unfortunate. Feedback is very important to us, and it can be very helpful; for example, it was feedback from one particularly helpful person that spawned most of the changes discussed in this letter. We really wish people would email us, sign the guestbook (either a public or a private message), or fill out our feedback forms once they're up and running to let us know what they think we're doing right and what we can be doing better. Otherwise, our potential for growth is very limited.

Thanks for sticking with us through this letter. We hope you now have a better sense of what's going to be happening over the next several days at Scuk.

Sincerely,
Liz and Uma