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Feb 13, 2020
1:50:24pm
El Jefe Evil Genius
A belated explanation of the site changes

Sorry I didn't get this up yesterday...

First, some background: CougarBoard's current design is based on an 8 year old theme that hasn't kept up with the times. It's not bad, but it could be a lot better. There are some new web standards that make designing web pages much better (custom elements, CSS grid, flexbox, etc, for those who care about such things). The changes I've made utilize these new standards. I'll be making additional changes over the next couple months that will move the rest of the site off of the old theme to the more modern theme. In the meantime, you may notice that some things (like the buttons) aren't always consistent across pages.

In addition the theming changes, I made some functional changes to the site:

  1. Over time, the predictions feature has been used less and less. Even when predictions are made, my analytics tell me that people usually don't check the results. Predictions have always been a pain to integrate into the UI of the site, and always seemed to make the user experience more complicated. For those reasons, I chose to remove the predictions feature. I apologize to those who enjoyed it. Congratulations to Cougarclaw for being the winner of the last season of the predictions contest!
  2. It's much easier to choose whether you're attending upcoming games and events.
  3. The "countdown" is no longer on the upcoming games. I don't think it was a very important feature, and nobody's complained to me about losing it.
  4. The home page now features all upcoming games (regardless of sport). The upcoming games were not on the home page at all before.
  5. Also related to the schedule, I removed the Notes feature, where you could include notes about each game for personal use. It looks like I was about the only one who ever used it.
  6. The tabs with top 10, articles, etc on the right of the list page have been removed. These were duplicated from the home page. In order to clean things up, and better differentiate between the home page and list page, I decided to remove them from the right side of the list page. I'm still considering some possible changes there, though; that may still be tweaked in the future.
  7. On the home page, the tabs for articles have been removed (articles, blogs, tweets, audio, video). Instead, we're treating all articles (except tweets) as the same, and put all of the top articles on the home page. There is no longer a place to view the "top tweets"; for the most part, people didn't click on the tweets, so it wasn't a very well-defined metric anyway.
  8. For upcoming games and articles, we now show the "sport" rather than the CougarBoard category. For some sports (like football or men's basketball), the icon is the same. Sports like "Gymnastics" or "Swimming" used to get grouped into the "Other BYU Sports" category, so you couldn't tell which was which by the icon. They each have a unique icon now, except for "Track & Field" and "Cross Country" — honestly, I just couldn't think of a good way to differentiate them. You'll also notice that the women's sports have pink Y icons rather than the blue Y, so you can more easily differentiate between Men's and Women's basketball, for example.

I'm sure there are some other tweaks, but I can't think of anything else major. If I missed anything, I'll update this post.

This message has been modified
Originally posted on Feb 13, 2020 at 1:50:24pm
Message modified by El Jefe on Feb 13, 2020 at 10:53:19pm
Message modified by El Jefe on Feb 13, 2020 at 10:54:03pm
El Jefe
Bio page
El Jefe
Joined
Sep 15, 2001
Last login
Mar 28, 2024
Total posts
76,740 (25,571 FO)
Related Threads Children:
What, no seconds? I demand a more precise countdown clock! (StantonMac, Feb 14, 2020 at 1:01pm)
POLL: Did you like having the game countdowns? (El Jefe, Feb 13, 2020 at 6:23pm)

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