Next week we’ll be rolling out significant enhancements to TechCrunch. A new design and a new logo will be the first thing you’ll notice. But behind the scenes we’ve made significant changes to the other end of TechCrunch as well – the admin system that we spend all day typing into. We are particularly focused on speed and efficiency. Pages should load much more quickly now than they have, and content should be much easier for our writers to create and publish.

We’re also going to fold some of our sister sites into TechCrunch. CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, and TechCrunch IT will all be under the TechCrunch domain. The old URLs will redirect, and readers will be able to see the content from those same writers via filters and topics on TechCrunch. TechCrunch EU, TechCrunch France and TechCrunch Japan will remain separate sites on the TechCrunch.com domain.

This has been a big project. We began last summer before the AOL acquisition. After the acquisition Dave Feldman, Director Consumer Experience at AOL, took over and brought in additional resources.

The team Dave put together involved people across AOL. Dave, Vice President Consumer Experience Matte Scheinker, Kiersten Hollars and Jason Tusman are from Brad Garlinghouse’s west coast operation. The core dev team, who all report in to Paul Berry from the Huffington Post, include Stephen Rouse, Nate Eagle, Andrew Vayanis, Ramesh Kumar, Dave Artz and Andrea Doyle. The TechCrunch dev staff also participated – Vineet Thanedar, Rob Saurini, and Anthony Nguyen. And we’re thankful to expert WordPress contractors Stresslimit and 10up, and to design agency Code And Theory.

We’ve also gotten a lot of help from WordPress VIP as well. And we’ve decided to remain on the WordPress platform for now. They’ve been excellent partners to us over the years.

When the new site launches we’ll write a new post from Dave Feldman detailing the changes you’ll see. Feldman has been hard at work finalizing the project – he even spent six hours in the emergency room this week after taking a surfboard to the face (his own, funny story). He spent four of those hours, he tells me, fixing bugs on UCSF’s WiFi.

This is the fourth time we’ve redesigned TechCrunch since launching in 2005. You can see some of the earlier versions here – 2005, 2006 and 2008.