Around the new BF: New layout options

Greetings, community members,

We've heard your feedback to our new site layout, and we appreciate the honestly and constructive comments. Over the next few days, we'll put together a series of posts highlighting certain new elements of the site so you can get familiar with them. To start, we're going to discuss the cover, which refers to the arrangement of stories at the top of the page. We'll walk you through the different layouts at our disposal and work together to figure out how to best use them.

First thing's first: the content we put in the cover is recent content. While the posts may not always be arranged perfectly in chronological order, if it's a new thing we've published, it will almost always stay in the cover for some time. We just might choose to highlight a longer piece in the top slot instead of the daily links or something smaller. Below the cover, the stories will generally flow in reverse chronological order just like before. We'll talk more about that in a future post.

Point being: we will rarely have a situation where there are very old stories in the cover. When you come to the homepage, you're almost always going to see the newest content. It is just arranged in a more egalitarian way rather than stacked on top of itself.

As for the cover, we have a few different layout options at our disposal, and us editors are still trying to work through which ones work best for which type of content. Here are the different options we have.

5-up

This layout will feature five articles, sections or StoryStreams in the cover. We'll probably use the 5-up one on standard days where we have lots of content. Here is an example.

In this case, we are featuring jkhan's clipboard, but we're also putting in the daily links post, the two latest community projections and the most recent in our Countdown series. These are the stories we published that day, all up top.

3-up

The 3-up cover is similar to the 5-up, but it only features three stories rather than 5. We may also use the 3-up cover when we want to highlight one post a little bit more. Here's an example of how that might look.

Once again, we have the most recent stories, but jkhan15's analysis gets a little more prominence.

4-up

This layout places a horizontal piece as the dominant art, then has three identical boxes beneath it. There are a lot of potential uses of this. One is on gamedays. We could put our game thread up top, then our other regular coverage beneath that.

This is also a potentially good layout when there is a big story and we are tracking it with our StoryStream technology. Imagine for a second that the three stories beneath the top one are follow-up posts to the main story.

Four-up could also be good to group all our gameday content into a StoryStream, then post the recap, quotes and game thread in the three slots beneath it.

Tryptic

This is another three-up layout, but each story has equal importance. This could be useful when we are tracking a story using the StoryStream technology, but also want room for our daily content.

One-up

Finally, we have the ability to feature just one story if it's a particularly long piece. We plan on using this layout sparingly and only for the biggest pieces, but here's what it could look like.

If we have a piece we're especially proud of and we want to feature heavily, we will use this. But like I said before, I imagine we will use it sparingly.

Those are the different layouts that us editors have at our disposal. We have some ideas on how best to use each of them, but we also value your input. What kinds of layouts would work best with gameday coverage? Everyday coverage? Coverage in the morning? Covering big news stories? Let us know your thoughts.