I’ve visited the Dallas Arboretum many times over the years, and I’ve always had a good time. Yet in all my visits to the Arboretum, I didn’t notice anything missing from the experience.

Until the other night.

That’s when we helped celebrate the opening of the Arboretum’s dramatic new $20 million Trammell S. Crow Education Pavilion, a 40,000-square-foot complex. The facility offers a beautiful, new entrance for visitors with a high-definition video orientation for first-timers, first-class classrooms and exhibit space, and a well-stocked new gift shop.

Not having these additions didn’t detract from my earlier visits; instead, the changes take the Arboretum experience to a whole new level.

That’s how I feel about some of the changes in this month’s magazine. Hopefully, you already enjoy the monthly experience we provide, but just as hopefully, the changes we’ve made will make the experience even better.

We’ve started with our front page, building around a more dynamic image and setting it off with bolder, less-cluttered headline type. We also moved the teaser headlines for stories inside the magazine to the bottom of the front page so they don’t detract from the cover image.

Inside, we’re using a bolder version of our original body text. And the headlines have an easier-to-read appearance as well as the photo captions and the quotes pulled from the stories.

And we’re working to broaden our advertising opportunities to include more neighborhood businesses, too. This month, we introduce a number of smaller neighborhood shops in our “Great Stuff” section on page 5; next month, we’ll be telling you about great neighborhood resources for children and families in our “Just Kid’n Around” section.

If you see something new that you like or don’t like, please let us know. If you know of something we should be writing about or covering, let us know that, too. And if you visit an advertiser because of an ad in our magazine, please tell them you read about them here.

As I said earlier, I liked the Arboretum just the way it was. But I like the new Arboretum a whole lot better.

We hope you’ll feel that way about our changes this month and in the near future, too.