Three large pots sit on the south side of my house.

They have been sitting there filled with dirt and topped with a layer of pine bark mulch for the last two weeks.

And in that dirt are seeds. Well not really seeds. Just below the surface are several long tubers that will grow to be bright orange Dahlias.

I bought these ugly roots at the garden store as a gift. Looking at the gnarled mess, I wondered how long it would take for them to become a bouquet of beautiful flowers.

So my wife planted them. And I watched.

Anybody who knows me knows that I can be an impatient person.

I eat my food too fast. I drive my car too fast. I generally live my life too fast.

So going out to these pots every morning to get some glimpse of green rising out of the dirt has been a rather excruciating experience for me.

Thirteen mornings in the garden have been spent with a careful inspection of the pots, only to be met with disappointment.

Then suddenly Wednesday morning, I walked out of the house and spied two tiny leaves poking their heads out of the ground.

Hurray!

Those two leaves offered promise of a colorful garden.

A similar thing has been happening over the last six months inside The Natchez Democrat newsroom.

The seeds of a new and exciting project have been slowly germinating within the building on Canal Street.

And like those three pots, there has been little evidence of this growth.

Since January staff members at The Natchez Democrat have been busily molding and creating this new site.

For the last eight years, The Natchez Democrat readers have been served by a dependable and informative Web site.

At its inception the site was the best of the best.

But like most gardens, the landscape has changed in the world of newspaper Web sites.

With new advances in Internet technology, it became evident that we needed to update our offerings.

In 1999, web logs, video, audio and the communication between the Internet and mobile devices rarely existed.

Now they do.

So last January we decided to plant the seeds for a bigger and better site. Since then, we have slowly and carefully tended to those seeds.

We have added more photos, more stories and more options to our readers.

We have prepared the way for video, audio and slideshows.

Instead of a sprinkling of news and opinion, the new natchezdemocrat.com will offer a wide array of stories and images.

Unlike our current site, the stories and images will not only be produced by our staff.

The new Web site will also include stories, photos and video produced by those who care most for our community — our readers.

All of the work has been behind the scenes — under the ground, if you will.

When I was first named the Web editor of The Natchez Democrat in January, I thought that it would be a few weeks before we would have a fully grown Web site.

Boy was I impatient.

But now, some six months later, the tiny green leaves of our new Web site will begin to peek out into the real world.

In the coming days, we will be handing our new design over to a group of testers who will be poking and prodding, looking for things that don’t work and offering suggestions on how things could work better.

Over the next three weeks, we will be making a few final adjustments and hopefully rid the site of any remaining bugs.

On Sunday, June 24, we will launch the new natchezdemocrat.com Web site to our entire readership.

And with the continued care and input from our readers, the Web site will continue to grow bigger and brighter long before the flowers in my garden are gone.

Ben Hillyer is the web editor of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3540.