In a few weeks, we’ll be relaunching cruzio.com with a new focus on our members and services. We’ll be streamlining the content and giving the site a completely new look — a fresh, modern makeover. It’ll be faster and easier to use and we’re really excited about the new direction.

We’ll still have lots of the great local content you love like news headlines, traffic, weather, surf and webcams, but as part of this update, we’ll be retiring some of the features of the site that few people have been using and which are better provided by other companies on the Internet. Although it may no longer appear on cruzio.com, any content you have uploaded will be archived and accessible free of charge for several months after the relaunch.

Here are some suggestions for alternate resources you may want to look into to replace these Cruzio features:

1. Profile Page

The Profile page will be replaced by a more practical center for our Member Tools. If you’ve been using your Profile Page as a “Business Card” website we’d be happy to point that URL to another site — perhaps a Facebook page, blog or small custom site. If you’re interested in developing a new web presence, we can put you in touch with some great local web designers.

2. Business Listings

We’re retiring mush of the Santa Cruz Guide and will no longer be attempting to provide a definitive list of all Santa Cruz businesses. We will still be sharing the benefits of our popular site with members by continuing to publish consultants and other business listings, wifi hotspots and webcams, as well as publicizing member events in the Cruzioworks space.

3. Photos

We’ll no longer be providing photo uploading and publishing services. We’ll archive all your photos for 6 months and, if you need them, just email us and we’ll be happy to get them to you. We recommend using a service like Flickr.com, Picasa.google.com or Instagram.com.

4. Blogs

We recommend using an online blogging platform like Tumblr or WordPress.com. If you need help setting your own custom blog, we can connect you with a local consultant. We’d also be happy to link to your new blog from cruzio.com, adding valuable SEO.

5. Community Calendar

On the new site, our calendar will be focused on events happening at Cruzioworks. There are several general community calendars in Santa Cruz — e.g. gtweekly.com and santacruzweekly.com — and we are also actively collaborating with the City to establish a definitive, open community calendar.

6. Movies

It’s been challenging keeping the Movie page accurate and up to date and rather than provide incorrect information, we’ll now be recommending checking santacruzweekly.com, gtweekly.com or movies.google.com for movie times.

We hope the new site will be much more useful and by focusing on the more popular elements, reorganizing the content and dramatically improving the search function, we‘ll be providing a much better service to our users. If you have any other suggestions for making the site better and more useful to you as a Cruzio member, please let us know.

Thanks for using cruzio.com.