Be part of our brighter future

We're starting to hatch our plans for a relaunched Disability Now website and, says editor Ian Macrae, we want to hear from you

Some time ago now we promised you a bigger, better and altogether different Disability Now web experience.

Unfortunately, the grand scale of our ambition was then frustrated by the recession and financial restraints that forced us to concentrate on reducing costs rather than investing in anything new.

Now, however, we’re daring to hope and dream again.

We have plans of our own for developing the site but we’d also like to hear from you about what you’d like to see us doing online.

Of course, we’ll continue to offer, across everything we do, content that is rooted in our lives as disabled people, how the actions of others affect us, and what we do to tackle our concerns and beat prejudice and discrimination.

But among the things we’re planning to deliver via the web is a fast, proactive and regularly updated news service, fired by professional and challenging journalism.

We want to expand all our content across the whole range of media, including video and audio podcasts that widen and add value to what appears in print.

We want to find ways of putting disabled people in closer, more direct contact with those who provide the goods and services we want or need to buy.

We’re aiming to create a social networking space where people can come to talk and swap views on those issues that are part of the big public debate, as well as sharing experiences, offering solutions to problems or encouraging people embarking on initiatives.

And we want to provide a rallying point so that people can flock to the cause of equality, anti-discrimination and disability rights.

But before we start on any of this, we’d like to hear from you about what you’d like the website to do.

How much and what sort of news would you like?

What kinds of goods and services would you like to see advertised and promoted online by us?

Would you like more or less of the celebrity-based material we currently offer in the cover features of the magazine?

What areas should the rest of our journalism be concentrating on?

What sorts of investigat­ions and exposés would you like us to mount?

How, in particular, could we be sure to get you more involved and making contributions?

Could we be making better use of platforms like Facebook and Twitter?

We’re looking to create something which is every bit as much your website as it is ours. So we want to hear from you about these and other areas of what we do and how we do it.