As we’re going to press on this issue, it’s almost Christmas and the NAILS team is gearing up to enjoy the holidays. But amid the shopping and wrapping for our families, we’ve spent countless hours working on a very special gift for you: a brand new website.

Our website was about five years old (Internet years are like dog years, so that made our site like 35 years old), and we needed to update and enhance our site to keep up with our increasingly web-savvy audience. And while we’re dedicated to our print magazine (it’s our pride and joy), it is a monthly presence in your life, and we realize the need to be a daily online presence in your business.

If you think about it, we can do so much more online than we can in print. We can create or host videos so you can actually see techniques being demonstrated. We can run an infinite number of photos (as opposed to print, where space is limited by the size of the magazine). We can group like items together so that if you are looking for a specific topic (soak-off gels, building your book, creating rockstar toes) you can find everything you are looking for in one place. And we can connect you to your peers through our forums and our social networking pages.

One of the new sections on our website that I’m excited about is the Encyclopedia — a compendium of terms, companies, and people in our industry — where you can look up information and related stories, products, videos, photo galleries, and more. As the industry has matured we realized that there are a lot of terms we may take for granted and histories that we know that need to be shared with newcomers.

We’ve also added a new Events Calendar that will help you find all of your continuing education and manufacturer-offered classes and events in one place. You can also view (almost) every single cover we’ve ever printed. (I say “almost” because as it turns out, we’re missing three very old issues: May 1983, December 1983, and April 1985. If you happen to own any of these three issues, we’d love to talk to you! E-mail Hannah.Lee@bobit.com.)

We’ve opened up the interactivity all over the website to truly make it an effort of you and us. You can comment and create conversations on just about every item on the site. We’ve increased the number of ways you can share your ideas as well, so one click will allow you to e-mail, “like” or post on Facebook, or Twitter an article or page that you want to share with others. In addition to this, we’ve created “My Page,” a place where you can save articles to a reading list so you can go back at your leisure to look at something more closely.

Our photo galleries are easier to browse through, NAILStv has more videos, and generally we’ve added more content broken into easy-to-find navigation. You’ll notice the new site has four main sections that mirror the print edition — Technique, Style, Business, and Health. And you’ll also be able to find all similar stories in one place. (Looking for all of our On the Road columns? Just click the On the Road tag.)

Like everything web-related, the great thing about this project is that it is ongoing and will only improve over time. We welcome suggestions on what you’d like to see on the site. Have a suggestion for a word, company, or person to include in the Encyclopedia? Just e-mail it to me. Have your own YouTube channel or cache of videos? Let me know and I’ll make sure to get them linked up through NAILStv. We want NailsMag.com to be the first place where you go online for any and all things nail-related. We hope you like this gift made especially for you.

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, Click here.