Arkansas Sports 360 - ArkansasSports360.com

7/11/2010 at 8:30am

Image by ArkansasSports360.com

The new ArkansasSports360.com.

It’s been a big week or two here at ArkansasSports360.com. We’ve just published our third annual High School and College Football Preview magazine. And, as you’ve already noticed, we’ve relaunched the website with a slick design and new features.

So what all have we done? Let’s take a quick tour, shall we?

Simple.

We realize the first iteration of ArkansasSports360.com, launched waaay back 2007, was complicated and unwiedly. There was just too much going on: myriad menus, lots of headlines crammed at the top of the page and loads of competing elements.

So we’ve streamlined things a bit. We tossed a lot of features that were redundant, confusing and unnecessary. And how did we know what to toss and what to keep? Readers told us. We analyzed years of traffic data to determined which features got attention and which were ignored.

You can see by the new design what stuff won. Traffic to our main blog has been booming, so we quickly made it more prominent. Recruiting, always a popular topic, gets it own column and menu item. And we made our Penthouse/Outhouse feature -- another hit -- bigger and bolder.

We also pared our main areas of news and blog focus -- the assorted sports and the four college athletic programs -- and gave them there own top-level homepages. Again, these were the most-trafficked areas of the site. Readers spoke and we listened.

Interactive.

The web is leaps and bounds more social now than when we debuted in 2007, and our old site simply didn’t satisfy the demands of the new rules of online conversation. The new site is much more conducive to sharing articles and blog posts, creating conversations and making comments on the issues of the day.

So now on each article or blog post, you’ll see these icons, allowing you to share our articles -- free of charge -- throughout the web, on places like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Digg, wherever. You can send it to your buddies in a good ol’ fashioned e-mail. Heck, you can print it and fax it around. Whatever works best for you.

Recognizing that our old commenting system was far too complicated, with added a plugin that allows you to easily sign in and comment on our site with your Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress or OpenID identities. More than likely, you already have accounts with these services, which will make signing in and commenting a snap. If you don’t have an account, you can easily set up a new one, complete with a custom avatar and username. Again, the choice is yours.

Note that if you sign in with your Facebook or Twitter accounts, you’ll have the option to easily share your comments on ArkansasSports360.com with our friends and followers on those networks, thereby getting them involved in the conversation as well.

And of course, there’s our new AS360 Boards, a message board where you can participate in and create your own topical conversations about all manner of Arkansas sports news. We’ve started it off with six major topics, including Razorbacks, recruiting and high school sports, and several threads. Feel free to join up, contribute and start your own threads.

Buzzworthy.
Finally, we’ve devised a breakthrough, top-secret business model that will allow us to offer loads of free content, gain millions of readers and ensure the future of online sports journalism for generations to come.

Wait. Actually, we haven’t done that! But we have created an exciting platform we think advertisers will want to be a part of. It’s a broad canvas for advertisers and their designers, and we launch with an ad that only hints at the possibilities for eye-catching creative and elegant messaging. Thanks to Vino’s for signing on so early.



And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are other features we won’t go into today that you’ll likely discover on your own. We hope you enjoy them, and we hope you enjoy the new site.

Thanks to your patience during the transition, and note there will continue to be tweaks and adjustments as we move forward. And if you have and feedback, critiques and suggestions for improvement, please feel free to let us know in comments or via e-mail here.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for reading.

Tagged: ArkansasSports360.com, Vino's, housekeeping, announcements