Welcome to the New-Look Salt City Hoops!

January 20th, 2014 | by Andy Larsen
Jeremy Evans sports a new look entering ESA before a recent Jazz game. Salt City Hoops also has a new look. Photo by Melissa Majchrzak/NBAE via Getty Images

Jeremy Evans sports a new look entering ESA before a recent Jazz game. Salt City Hoops also has a new look. Photo by Melissa Majchrzak/NBAE via Getty Images

As you can tell, Salt City Hoops has updated its design. We’ve worked on this for many months now, and we are extremely proud to be launching this new design for a project we truly love. Here’s what we hope we accomplished with a new design:

Easy-to-find articles

Part of the problem with our old format was how spacious it was: if you were looking for an article from just a few days ago, you’d have to scroll and scroll to find what you were looking for. Now, we have Salt City Hoops’ latest 13 articles on the home page, with a photo and excerpt of each. Additionally, we’ve revamped the menu bar to feature our articles sorted by category: if you’d like to read all of the articles about Gordon Hayward that Salt City Hoops has published, you can: simply roll over the Players menu item and select Gordon Hayward. We’ve also included a search feature in that main menu, so that you can search by keyword if you’d like. We’ve also got the blog articles sorted, so if you’d like to read all of the Triple Team game recaps, you can do so easily. Newer articles are more likely to be sorted than older articles, but we’ll be working through the archives in the coming days and putting everything in its place.

More mobile friendly:

If you’re accessing Salt City Hoops on your phone or tablet, you’ll notice that this site scales much better than the previous one did. Scrolling is even more of a pain on mobile than it is on a desktop, we’ve hoped to minimize that somewhat. The mobile menu also works well, giving you the same functionality on the desktop without having to worry about rolling over your desired category.

More appealing:

The old site was very text heavy, and while we’re serious folks at Salt City Hoops, that doesn’t mean we can’t find better ways to use images and video. Both are much more elegantly implemented in this design.

Nifty T-Shirts:

We’ve worked with Matt Carver, a freelance designer, to create T-Shirts. His work has been featured on Reddit and Twitter, he is perhaps most famous for his Swat Lake City T-Shirts. We’ll be adding some Jazz-inspired designs to our portfolio, but for now, we’re starting with this classy Salt City Hoops logo printout, so you can show everyone your favorite Jazz blog. You can buy them for $15 each at our store.

Radio/Podcast player:

One of the more unique things Salt City Hoops has in its portfolio is the Salt City Hoops Saturday Show, a weekly radio show on 97.5/1280 The Zone that talks about the Jazz at a high level each Saturday afternoon from 3-4. We wanted to show that off more easily, and so the Stitcher player of the latest show appears on the sidebar of both the home page and each post. The sidebar player will also feature our burgeoning midweek podcasts, recorded by our writing team in the middle of each week. As a reminder, you can also listen to Salt City Hoops Radio through iTunes.

Breaking news: 

We’ve implemented a “Breaking News” scroller at the top of the design, to be used when some truly big piece of news breaks in Jazzland. Yes, we’ve turned it on for this article, but we’ll use it sparingly.

Side notes:

Per our writers’ request, we’ve implemented Grantland-style sidenotes into SCH’s design. 1 This will allow for more precision in our writing, more sourcing, and more snarky asides, leaving our audience more informed and entertained. Obviously, you won’t see it in older articles, but you’ll start seeing it pop up in newer posts.

We hope you like the new design. We know some change is uncomfortable, but we hope the above additions make it all worthwhile. If you encounter any problems or have any questions or suggestions, please let us know by emailing us at saltcityhoops@gmail.com. Have fun, and go Jazz!

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