Every so often teams need to change the look of their uniforms, which is basically what we’ve done with the website you are now looking at.
The process took about three months to accomplish and was the result of lots of hard work put forth by many people, specifically Joe Wolford, software developer/multimedia specialist at Citynet, Grant Dovey, our new athletic department digital media manager, Nathaniel Zinn, assistant athletic director and sports marketing director, along with the rest of the Athletic Communications staff.
What you are viewing is dramatically different than anything we’ve done in recent years – it’s much cleaner and sleeker with less clutter geared toward making our great content more easily assessable with fewer clicks.
It also incorporates some of the elements from West Virginia University’s new branding campaign “Mountaineers Go First,” officially unveiled last winter.
More than a decade ago, when everyone was trying to get a handle on how to hand-code websites, what users went to was awkward and clunky-looking with very little design appeal.
This was one of our first designs from 1998 when the site was called MSNsportsNET.com.
Looking back at one of our first stabs at website design in 1998 brings back memories of that awful sixth-grade picture you took when your mother used a bowl to cut your hair and then sent you to school wearing a turtle neck sweater and plaid pants. After you got your picture taken you had to spend the rest of the morning and afternoon taking abuse from your friends until you fought your way onto the school bus to go home.
Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite THAT bad, but as the years wore on our web designs began to take on more of a professional look, beginning in 2000 when we went to Charles Ryan Associates to get our first comprehensive analysis of what we were attempting to do.
Subsequent designs continued the trend of adding more coding, scripts and graphics as agencies began familiarizing themselves with all of the slick technology out there.
By the end of the decade, however, the website had grown so complex and cumbersome that it was becoming extremely difficult for the various browsers and operating systems to handle all of the data it was attempting to process. It was taking lots of computer memory just to make an image move across the masthead, or to push photos through the story rotator to get to the next story.
Then, when mobile devices became popular we had to scramble to come up with a solution to accommodate them, just as our peers were doing.
These rapid changes required our software developers to devise complicated ways of making the website work with everything that is out there. You frequently heard them reference older versions of Internet Explorer as “Internet Exploder!” when the browser wouldn’t play nicely with our website.
For our last design we had to create homepages for desktops, tablets and older browser types that couldn’t handle some of the scripting that was being used.
Well, all of that has been eliminated on the website you are now looking at today. This is the first time we’ve designed the website from the mobile device back to the desktop using a “responsive design,” which in lay terms means a universal viewing experience across all devices.
Everything you see now on your phone or tablet when you get up in the morning to when you get to work to check back with us on your desktop at lunchtime is all there, right down to the rotating advertisements at the top of the page.
The primary objective of this design is to make our content just as important as the presentation, instead of focusing much of our time solely on the presentation, and for everyone to be able to find the information they are looking for easily and conveniently.
Change can sometimes be difficult and unwanted, and just like uniform changes, oftentimes it simply boils down to a matter of personal preference. However, as you begin to use this website we are confident you will come to appreciate our new, sleek look – along with the content we will continue to deliver.
So after you’ve kicked the tires and taken it out for a test spin, we encourage you to fill out this short form below and send us your thoughts.
We’d love to hear from you.
In the meantime, Let’s Go Mountaineers!
