One of the handiest new wrinkles in Web design is the use of tabs to provide many different samplings of content within a compact area on a home page. The home pages of Yahoo and CNET, among many others, make good use of such tabbed promo boxes.

We just came across The Sacramento Bee’s clever wrinkle on this wrinkle.

Sacbee.com enables users to assemble their own customized collection of tabs. Going beyond the usual suspects for categories (Top News, Politics, Sports…), the site offers tabs for many local regions (Antelope, Elk Grove, Yolo County…) as well as for topics off the beaten path (Coffee Break).

The site also lets users specify whether the promo box should rotate through the tabs automatically, and how fast.

In effect, Sacbee.com is giving each member of its audience an easy way to preview and access content within “channels” that interest him or her the most. That’s a personalization strategy that nearly every Web site could put to good use.

Way to be, Bee.