Hi there. You might notice things look a little different around here all a sudden. It’s because that second redesign, promised as far back as October, just went into effect.
- Obviously, we’ve got a banner, a real one. The concept is thus: The typeface is from a newspaper that you might read in 1867, back when the Marquess of Queensberry rules from which we derive our name (and which govern the sport of boxing) were published. The ring at the right has a microphone hanging down in the center, because what we do here, of course, is talk about boxing. The boxing gloves hanging off the “Q” are just for fun.
- At the top of our new column on the left, you’ll see the real champions in each boxing division, which serves a dual purpose. Both purposes are devoted to helping non-hardcore fans follow along, which is a goal of mine — I love the regular fans, but I also want to introduce new fans to the sport and make it easy for them to get into it. Purpose A.: By far the most common question I get from people who don’t follow boxing is, “How do I know who the champions are?” The answer is now prominently placed on this blog. Purpose B.: I will no longer have to do that clunky thing I currently do, where I give the weight limit of every division in every blog entry. A lot of non-hardcore fans don’t have this information at the ready, but now there’ll be a cheat sheet at the top left of the page at all times. (Both Ring magazine and our pals at Bad Left Hook, for starters, include a similar feature on their sites.)
- There are a couple other features, including a link to our major categories, pretty standard for most blogs, and a link to a boxing news feed — because while I try to follow everything that happens all the time, there may be occasions where merely linking to the latest news is doing readers a service. Likewise, each entry now includes a link at the bottom to every boxer and category mentioned, which allows readers to very quickly find other things we’ve written, about, say, “Muhammad Ali.”
There’s one more feature I hope to add, and there might be another couple slight modifications we make in the very near term for readability and other reasons. Big thanks to the MVN team that implemented all this in a very short period of time: Brandon Rosage, Tyson Rosage, Evan Brunell and Cory Humes. Feedback is welcome.
