May 28, 2014 by Charlie Eisenhood in Livewire, Video with 2 comments
We hope you were able to join us this weekend for our coverage of the College Championships. Alongside all of our reporting, you may have noticed a fresh look and feel to the website. That’s because we implemented a brand new, built-from-the-ground-up redesign on Friday. Learn more below.
Orion, our Director of Technology and the man responsible for the new site, has a bit more about the site here. I want to talk about how the editorial content will fit into the new mold.
The first thing to notice is that the site is fully responsive. On a big widescreen monitor, you should see three columns on the homepage: Up for Debate on the left, the news column in the middle, and Livewire on the right. As the screen shrinks to a smaller laptop, a tablet, and on down to a mobile device, things will compress accordingly. The livewire column on tablet and mobile is sideswiping (try it!) and the ‘Up for Debate’ gets pushed to the bottom of the page. Try playing around with your zoom settings on desktop to see the responsiveness change.
Things are not 100% finalized at this time; there are some great new features still to come.
Now let’s talk editorial.
The content published on Ultiworld isn’t going to change dramatically. Here to stay is news reporting, tournament coverage, game analysis, and all of the opinions and features we’ve published since the inception of the site. But things are rearranged a bit.
Looking for the latest Tiina Booth column? It’s going to be found over in the ‘Up for Debate’ column on the left (or bottom). There, you can find the most recent analysis or opinion article from all of our top voices. It won’t change constantly — those are articles we want you to see and come back to.
The center column is where you’ll find the bulk of our reporting and news content. It should be easy to navigate and still follows the blog format of most recent at the top.
The right-hand column — Livewire — is where things will be the most different. It is basically a mashup of the editor’s blog from our previous site — where I and other Ultiworld editors share thoughts on a variety of topics — and a curated feed of outside content.
When we see a cool highlight video, a great picture, a thought-provoking quote, or a link to something worth reading outside of Ultiworld, you will find it in Livewire. It is our fastest-moving column, and will be updated frequently throughout the day.
If you’re a long time Ultiworld reader, you might remember when we had a ‘link dump’ post called Light, Dark, and Cleats. Livewire essentially brings together the kind of content that fit there and cycles it into its own mini-blog.
Please continue to send us feedback on the redesign and feature requests to [email protected].
We hope you find the new format as exciting as we do!
