Welcome to everyone visiting BallinEurope.com today, the first day in the rest of the life of the website.
The most obvious design change is of course our revamped logo, featuring Arvydas Sabonis from those glory days of Lithuanian basketball in the early 1990s and current-day Olympiacos team leader Vassilis Spanoulis. But not only is the look itself updated, the coding involved in creating the background is quite a bit “cleaner” that that of the previous graphic, which should result in much quicker load times.
To more properly integrate BallinEurope.com with Twitter (BiE’s weekday obsession), a feed to the BiE_basketball Twitter account is now included with the right-hand banner.
Finally, with something of greater emphasis in BiE Land these days on the BallinEurope/heinnews co-produced “Taking the Charge” podcast series, a tab for the ‘casts has replaced the “Euroleague Transactions Table.” While the ‘table has been a popular feature at BallinEurope.com in the past, we’re finding that more and more websites boast such a feature — and quite frankly, certain rumor-emphasizing ‘sites have caught up to and surpassed BiE in this area. Whereas five years ago, a “transfers table” was unique among European basketball-centric websites, this is nearly requisite stuff these days.
BallinEurope.com will have some new concept in place by the time Euroleague free-agent season starts in the runup to 2013-14, but for now we’re pimping the podcast.
A few more features may be added in coming days — we’re still working on more video players, for example — but please feel free to comment on what we see right now. Quite honestly, we love the new design and hope you do, too!
As always, thanks for reading; stick around for continued coverage of European basketball in all its myriad aspects!
