The new-look BaseballGB is here

 

We’ve been mentioning for a few weeks now that a new design was on the horizon and, after several months of planning, I’m delighted to finally launch the new-look BaseballGB.

BGB started as a one-man blog and has gradually developed into a site with several writers that combines what you might call traditional blog-posts with news stories, full-length articles and regular columns.  That transition has been great news for me because that is exactly what I hoped would happen when I began blogging on my own back in early 2006; however, the evolution of the site has meant that the previous design was no longer ideal.

Why change?

From an aesthetic point of view, I wanted a more eye-pleasing design with a slightly wider area for the article text and the ability to make greater use of images.  From a functional point of view, I was becoming increasingly aware that, due to the regularity of our posting, good content was very quickly slipping out of obvious view on the main page.  This was particularly the case with our regular columns.  I wanted to have the ability to set a clear ‘headline’ story and to highlight the latest instalments of our regular features, whilst also giving enough space to the other articles we publish and offering lots of different ways in which to search our ever-expanding archive.

The new design allows us to do just that.

What it means for you

‘New’ means ‘different’, so the way in which you will navigate around the site has changed a little.  Obviously the main difference is that a larger selection of content is now available from the main page.  It is no longer just a simple list of the latest posts in date order.  A headline story will be set manually so that the most recent substantial article is listed at the top of the page.  For example: if we write a piece about some interesting British baseball news and then publish a quick update about a new multimedia feature on MLB.com, the British baseball piece can stay at the top of the pile. The MLB.com piece will be published as the main story underneath the category bar. If the headline story is the same as when you last looked, check below the colourful category bar to see if any posts have been added since then. 

Aside from the ‘headline’ area, we can keep items on the main page in two key ways.  The first is in the ‘featured’ carousel that will serve as a ‘best of BGB collection’, with the seven most recent additions to the category being put in the carousel.  The second is via the ‘category spoilers’ that can be found on the right-hand side of every page.  These will highlight our regular features, such as ‘You are the Scorer’ and ‘Weekly Hit Ground Ball’ and we will change them around, as well as the items listed in the category bar, to suit what is most topical at the time. 

New features

You’ll notice that we’ve added in a new Tag Cloud on the right-hand sidebar through which you will be able to search for posts relating to a wide variety of key words.  For example: posts about the upcoming Fall Classic will be put in the MLB category and then have tags attached to them for ‘World Series’, ‘Philadelphia Phillies’ etc.  Click on a tag from the cloud and it will take you to an archive of posts that relate to it.  Individual posts do not currently show which tags have been attached to them (although you can see which category/categories they are filed under) as I’ve always thought that this looks a little untidy, particular if you attach quite a few tags to a post.  However, the idea of the redesign is to make a better experience for our visitors, so if there is a demand for them to be added then I am certainly open-minded about doing it.

A list of the recent posts and comments are available on the right-hand sidebar alongside a list of categories.  The full month-by-month archive can be found via the new menu bar as a sub-heading under the ‘About’ page (the latter was written just before the 2009 MLB season began and could now do with being updated, so I’ll get to that over the coming week).  We’ve also created a separate page for our list of links.  If you know of any other baseball-related sites that fans in the UK would find useful and enjoyable, please let us know.

The footer currently takes you into the the BaseballSoftballUK news feed, the Project Cobb Twitter account and my BaseballGB Twitter account.  I update the latter on a frequent basis, chatting during MLB games, commenting on the latest baseball news and also discussing upcoming articles and features.

The other important new feature that deserves a mention here is the ‘Contact’ page that also can be found under the ‘About’ heading.  We’ve been contacted by people via our direct e-mail addresses in the past, but putting your e-mail address on the Internet can lead to a plague of spam filling your Inbox.  This new form will allow you to get in contact with the writer of your choice directly by filling in the form.

The updating process

The new design requires us writers (or this editor) to slightly alter the way we lay out our articles.  That’s no problem with those that we write from now on; however we have over 1,000 posts in the system dating back to March 2006 and they have been laid out to fit into the previous design(s).  For example, often when we have used images in the past, we have embedded them into the post by linking to another website (most commonly Joe’s GBBSA site).  The consequence of this with the new design is that where posts are listed (under category archives, author archives etc) a box with a cross will appear alongside it to indicate that it cannot display the image as it has to be hosted on our own server.  That’s not ideal, but we can only fix these things by manually checking and editing every post one-by-one, which would make for a significant amount of work.

I’m also mindful that a) these slight flaws shouldn’t detract too much from the content, and b) the time spent doing all that work would be better spent on writing new articles.

So, I’ve taken a pragmatic approach to this problem.  The most important thing for me was to make sure that previous posts could still be found easily; therefore I have gone through all of the posts to alter things like categories and tags, which to a certain extent can be done in bulk thanks to WordPress, the underlying blogging system we use.  I have then taken a targeted approach to update those in the archive that I feel are most likely to be of interest to future visitors.  This includes posts from the regular features such as ‘Weekly’ Hit Ground Ball, This week in MLB, You are the Scorer, Roundshaw Hop, BaseballGB Fantasy League updates, as well as the book reviews (47 and counting) and other featured articles (Q&As with Great Britain players etc).   The work built up over a period of time so that a good proportion of posts have been updated in this way. The rest will be left in the current not-quite-perfectly-formatted state, unless I decide to do a bit of website housekeeping every now and then.

What’s next?

A website never stays static, at least it shouldn’t.  No doubt I will be making some minor tweaks to the new design as it beds in over the next couple of weeks and we are always looking at ways in which we can improve things in terms of design, functionality and new features. 

Although there’s an offseason for the players, that doesn’t extend to us fans and writers.  The lack of baseball games doesn’t greatly reduce the amount of MLB news there is to comment on, particularly when it comes to the Hot Stove of player transactions.  I got into a routine of posting a baseball book review on most Wednesdays over the last offseason and I’m planning to do so again this time.  I’ve already got several books on my list waiting to be reviewed, but please pass on any recommendations for books that haven’t been covered yet.  I’ll also be running a series of ‘review’ articles looking back at the 2009 season in relation to MLB, the British leagues, the International scene, coverage of the sport available to UK-based fans and much more besides.  If you’ve got any ideas for articles/features, or if you want to join in with the writing, please get in contact via the new Contact form.

Of course before all of that we’ve got the World Series to enjoy.  It promises to be a cracker, which makes it all the more depressing that it will not be on free-to-air TV in the UK for the first time in over a decade.  I desperately scoured the TV listings for Wednesday 28 October in the hope that someone somewhere had picked up the rights. All I found was re-runs of films and US dramas.  Five will be showing a “live interactive gameshow” called SuperCasino, which is about as pathetic as it gets. 

So we’ll turn to MLB.com or ESPN America to follow the action and use various social networking sites, forums, blogs and websites to keep the British baseball community together in place of Johnny and Josh’s peerless coverage.  Hopefully BaseballGB will continue to be one of the main places on the web that does this and that the new design makes it all the more enjoyable.

If you’ve got any queries or comments, please feel free to pass them on via the comments box below.

Cheers

Matt

(P.S. it would be completely remiss of me not to publicly thank Joe for his help in designing logos and offering suggestions as part of the redesign, all while doing work on his own sites. Thanks mate!)