We are excited to announce that beginning in August the consumerreports.org website is getting remodeled. Visitors will see a fresh new look to the homepage and the category homepages. Just like your house and you other purchases we took our own advice. Consumer Reports online needed a fresh coat of paint and we have started the process.

As a valued donor, we wanted to provide a first look at the new site. Only approximately only half of our traffic will get a chance to see the refreshed look. The updated homepage is fun and revitalized. We have cleaned up the overall appearance and enhanced the search for a much better experience.

Since consumerreports.org will be under construction for a while, not all pages and articles will be updated right away. Our goal is to give you a clean and pleasant experience, all the while evolving the site to be the best as possible.

You can see the changes right now, by clicking the following link - http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/homepage1/index.htm. Please give it a thorough review. And when you are done, please let us know what you think. You will be asked on consumerreports.org for your comments. We hope you enjoy the refreshed Consumer Reports Online!

DUSKY LIGHTING AND A COOL TEMPER- ATURE create a serene atmosphere in the main photo-graphy studio at Consumer Reports’ headquarters. In ad-dition to the white screens, black cur-tains, lighting um-brellas, and other essential equipment, half a dozen upright vacuum cleaners stand in a row, ready for their close-ups.

Presiding over this efficient and dynamic workplace is John Walsh, Consumer Reports’ Photography Program Leader. For more than two decades John has used his photographic skills to present countless products—images that enable our readers to see what a model being reviewed actually looks like inside, outside, and all around.

To give consumers as much information as possible, John and his team take more than 20,000 photos every year for our print and online publications.

The studio is outfitted with the most advanced photo equipment and peripheral technology, and John and his team of photographers are constantly evaluating new gear. The perfunctory black and white images that appeared in early

artistic sensibility, and ability to document products accurately. Our readers want more than just pretty pictures; they need to see the differences between two cooktops or the design flaw in a cell phone. “The image has to convey a lot of information,” says John, “something visual that the reader can connect with the ratings.”

Multiple images are taken of the more than 150 test samples that pass through the studios every week. “Taking the picture,” John points out, “is just the first step in a complicated and labor intensive process.” The work begins once an item is bought by our secret shoppers and arrives in our warehouse, where it receives an ID number and “pedigree” (a standardized cataloguing of its features). Large appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines are then sent to the main photo studio to be readied for the camera. They’re brand new, but they still have to be prepped and meticulously cleaned before they are placed on the set and photographed; fingerprints are not acceptable. The photographers take a series of predetermined shots of each item so readers can visually compare models and features.

Meanwhile, across the hall from the main studio is a flexible one that can be broken down into four different sets and configured for smaller devices such as cell phones, blenders, and computers. The work moves at a brisk pace regardless of an object’s size, and the photos are clear and consistent.

Once all the pictures are taken and photoshopped as needed, they are entered into a photo archive database accessible by our team of art directors. Every product tested in the past 15 years has a catalogue of views, and any one of the hundreds of thousands of those photos can be pulled up in minutes. Whether it’s a coffee maker carafe or a treadmill deck, the image is an important reference point for product information. While we haven’t yet verified that a picture is worth a thousand words, to our readers it’s priceless.

Congratulations! You've won a headache.

The Do Not Call list was created by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2003 in response to public outcry over unwanted marketing calls. It has indeed slowed the avalanche of telemarketing calls from legitimate companies. But unwanted calls haven’t disappeared completely. Far from it; last year the FTC received more than three million complaints about them. Some legitimate companies still aren’t respecting the Do Not Call list, and many of the unwanted calls are from scammers or non-legit companies, and they don’t care if they violate the law. Many operate overseas, making prosecution even tougher. So far, the FTC has collected only eight percent of the $1.2 billion in fines levied for violating the Do Not Call list.

The problem is so bad that the FTC asked the public for its best “hacking” ideas to block these calls. Scammers are getting ever more sophisticated; new technology makes it easy to spoof a phone number, so that a scammer can show up on your caller ID as an apparently legitimate number, and trick you into answering the phone.

Worse, telephone scammers target vulnerable consumers, including the elderly. Consumers lost some $350 million to scams in 2011, according to the latest available FTC data.

You, yes you, can get in on this deal!

So what's Consumers Union doing about it? A better question might be what are you, our supporters, doing about it? The answer is plenty. You were absolutely essential to this fight. Some 200,000 of you signed petitions to the FCC asking commissioners to act on two

major fronts. The first: shut down businesses that want to robocall your cell phone.

The law has long made clear that robocalls can only come to your cell phone in an emergency, or if you give your express permission. Over the last few months, a number of companies asked the FCC to loosen the rules. For example, some businesses wanted to let debt collectors robocall your cell. Others wanted to be able to robocall your cell if the person who owned the number before you had given his permission.

Our second petition asked the FCC to respond to 39 state attorneys general who asked for clarification about telephone companies’ legal ability to use call-blocking technology. Those tools already exist, and companies like Nomorobo in the U.S. and Primus in Canada have proven that they can be offered for free. In late July, 45 attorneys general joined the FCC, the Senate Committee on Aging, and almost 400,000 consumers who had called on carriers to provide the technology at no charge. We believe that consumers are already paying a lot for phone service, and blocking robocalls shouldn’t cost them more.

They can hear us now

Businesses thought that it would be a slam-dunk to get cell robo-calling exemptions and derail free call-blocking tools. But thanks to your activism, the FCC said ‘not so fast.’ On June 18, as part of a package of protections, commissioners voted to authorize robocall-blocking tools, and explicitly prohibited debt collectors from robocalling your cell. And they maintained the rules against “wrong number” robocalls—companies can only robocall a wrong number once before potentially facing serious penalties.

The FCC did allow a few types of robocalls to your cell phone, but only for certain free, “time-sensitive” notifications about prescription refills, financial fraud alerts, and the like. The FCC has warned businesses that they must make it easy for you to opt out of those robocalls and text messages.

The issue clearly hits a nerve with consumers. The campaign's Facebook post reached nearly 170,000 people, was liked by more than 7,000, and was shared about 1,400 times.

The FCC has made it clear: The major carriers should provide you with the tools to block robocalls. So now those companies have no more excuses. We’ll be putting substantial pressure on the carriers to act. To get involved, or for information on how to call your carrier and say that you are sick of robocalls, go to EndRobocalls.org.

Looking to broaden our social media reach and engage new audiences, six years ago Consumer Reports acquired a popular website called Consumerist. With an average monthly audience of more than two million unique visitors, Consumerist.com serves up important consumer news with a punchy, youthful tone.

Consumerist’s mission is to help readers understand, engage with, and discuss the systems and forces that influence the marketplace. Just like Consumer Reports, Consumerist does not allow any advertising or corporate support of any kind. The site is dependent on the money we raise from subscriptions and donations from generous people like you.

Want a taste? Here are three of the site’s most powerful articles thus far in 2015. You can find these and many more at Consumerist.com. You can also sign up to receive a twice-weekly email digest of the site’s top content.

•In March, Consumerist made national news with the story of Seth, a reader from Washington State. Seth was left with little choice but to sell the house he'd just moved into because no

one—not Comcast, not CenturyLink, not the local county-owned network—was willing to provide the much-needed Internet connection for his home office, even though both cable companies claimed to service the address and the county’s high-speed connection was readily available. Consumerist’s investigation probed the question of how consumers can become trapped by regional telecom monopolies and the state laws they backed.

•April brought the bizarre tale of Val, a California woman who was being sued for defamation after her mother blew the whistle to state regulators about patient mistreatment in her Los Angeles-area nursing home. Val was not being sued because she had made inaccurate or false statements about the home, but simply for sending a single e-mail to her mother's attorney. Now that the court has thrown out the defamation claim, Val is trying to make sure that the large, national law firm behind the frivolous suit is held to account, but the California court system is putting up roadblocks.

•Also this spring, Consumerist took an in-depth look into the grassroots efforts by numerous faith-based groups to combat the blight of predatory financial products like payday lending, pawn shops and auto-title loans. “Some churches are seeing their congregations get caught up in these loans themselves,” Stephen Stetson, of the Alabama-based Arise Citizens’ Policy Project, told Consumerist. "People are coming to pastors saying 'I’m in quicksand and can’t get out.'"