When a three-alarm fire breaks out, or schools face budget cuts or the U-M football team lands a highly touted recruit, that's news you come looking for on AnnArbor.com

Now, we're making it easier for you to find major stories like these. We've just introduced a new "Top Stories'' module to our home page so that we can better showcase the biggest news of the day.

We've added other major upgrades to the site as well, including a new restaurant guide and an improved "Got News?'' tool that makes it easier for people to contribute their own content on AnnArbor.com. In addition, we've added important new social media features to the Events calendar that we launched in November.

The addition of a Top Stories module is in response to people who want a more hierarchical approach to how we present the major stories of the day.

Our home pages uses the "river of news'' model in which stories flow down the page as new stories are posted at the top. This river keeps the home page fresh and emphasizes the most recent stories.

But people who use our site have told us they want some element of hierarchy. They want to quickly see what the top stories of the day are, and they think the biggest news stories should remain highlighted at the top of the home page for a longer period of time. The new Top Story treatment accomplishes that, while other stories beneath it continue to flow down the home page as usual.

The top stories will be chosen by our editors, based on news value and the amount of readership and commenting that they're generating.

Another important addition to the site is our new Restaurants guide. This is, after all, a community that's know for its many great restaurants, so a comprehensive guide to dining is a natural here.

You can get to our dining guide by clicking on the "Restaurants'' tab on the navigation bar at the top of the home page. There's also a link to it on the right rail of the home page.

Our guide has up-to-date information on almost 500 restaurants in Washtenaw County. You can search it by cuisine or by price or by community. You can see what specials restaurants are offering, and you also can check out "The Dish,'' which is a real-time feed (if you'll pardon the pun) of discounts, special offers and other information from local restaurants. Whatever the time of day, or whatever you have a taste for, you can find the right dining option and the best bargains in our Restaurants guide.

Another improvement is our latest tool to allow community members to contribute information on the site. Since we launched, we've had a feature on the site called "Start a Conversation,'' which was designed to allow people to submit their own information, but it's gotten very little use. So it's being replaced with a new tool with a new name. We're calling it "Got news? Tell us.''

You'll see this prompt at the top of our topic pages and also at the bottom of our home page and at the bottom of every other page on the site. You can use this new tool to submit information in a variety of ways. You can suggest a story idea. You can express an opinion on a local issue. You can post information on an event you're involved in. You can choose what topic you want your information to appear in, and it also will appear in a new community spot on the site that we're calling the Community Wall. For more information on how to use the "Got news? Tell us'' feature, read this tutorial.

Meanwhile, we've made improvements to our Events calendar as well. The calendar, launched in November, is your complete guide to what's happening in the local entertainment scene. It also has information on many other events, whether they involve food, recreation, sports, business or other topics.

We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from people who are finding our new calendar to be comprehensive and easy of use. If you aren't regularly using it to find out what's going on and plan your entertainment activities, we encourage you to give it a try, especially with the new features we've just added. As of today, you can now comment on events, and you also can now download events to your own calendar.

When we launched, we promised that our Web site would evolve quickly based on feedback from the community. These latest improvements to the site are another example of that. We invite you to check them out and tell us what you think.