´óÏó´«Ã½

The last few months of the year are traditionally a quiet period in the sporting calendar so it is a good time to do a spot of housekeeping.

Over the coming months, will be the home for our coverage of the build-up to the Beijing Games. It will receive an overhaul for the event when demands will radically change as we're suddenly thrust into our busiest sporting event.

may inspire more passion, but in terms of workload, there is nothing to compare to the , with non-stop action for about 15 hours and up to 35 finals a day across the 28 different sports for more than a fortnight.

The website will look very different when it switches into 'live' mode, with up to six streams of live video and a constant flow of stories, statistics and photos that will require us to bring in many new staff.

But that still, thankfully, seems a long way off and for now the site will allow us to create a more coherent journey to the Games themselves.

Olympic qualification (a complex process, with each of the 28 sports, and the disciplines within them, having their own set of events, criteria and timetable) is under way, but the real scramble for places will begin in earnest in early spring.

We will be following a series of candidates, at least one or two from pretty much every sport, on the site - we've set up a specific where you can read their latest diary or scan the photos we hope they'll be taking for us.

Some of them - such as 21-year-old , 19-year-old and 13-year-old diver Tom Daley, last night voted Young Sports Personality of the Year - are featured in a new TV series, , the first run of which goes out from Monday 19 December.

We're working with the show so chunks of the footage they film ahead of the next run post-Beijing, will appear on the site.

Those three in particular seemed set to be superstars by 2012 as far as I can tell - young, driven and in love with their sport and the thrill of competing (as Daley showed in his incredibly composed speech to the packed Sports Personality crowd in Birmingham on Sunday night).

With research by the IOC showing that young people in particular are less interested in the Games, seeing it as a distant, confusing event that only happens once every four years, young people have been telling us that they would like to see more about the competitors - usually also young like them - and more about how to get into the sports themselves, from our coverage.

So we're looking at building more of that into what we do on the web.

We want to take up the 'legacy' challenge so firmly , and do our bit to help increase participation in sport and improve the health of the nation.

The government target is to increase the number of people playing sport by 2m by 2012. There are rumbles from a few people in sports administration that we are already but for our part, we think one way to do that is to create content that can inspire young people to actually take up sport and to weave that content not only into our event coverage, but into other bits of the ´óÏó´«Ã½, such as ´óÏó´«Ã½ Switch the new teen-focused strand, and indeed the wider web (so we've set up groups on and ).

It is the kind of content we've been creating on since 2002; tips and tricks from stars and coaches designed to help young people learn more about sport and be inspired.

So, as the site goes live this week, all 28 Olympic sports will be firmly brought under the Olympic banner - making more of their Olympic status and the fact we are the Olympics broadcaster in the UK.

One small consequence of this is that we have moved some sports such as from within our 'Other Sport' section on the website, into the 'Olympic' section. We hope this doesn't confuse too many of you for too long and are adding links around the site to direct people to the new location.

Anyway, as ever, let us know what you think.