Welcome To The New Look GoPrincetonTigers.Com

 TigerBlog looked at his computer this morning at 4:06 and saw this:

It's not what he was hoping to see. Nope. Not at all.

After more than 10 years of seeing that, he was ready for something different.

This morning at 4 a.m. was supposed to be the time for the relaunch of the newly redesigned goprincetontigers.com, the official website of Princeton Athletics. The old, familiar design had been unchanged since early in 2004, as TB said, more than 10 years ago.

And now, TB was brimming with excitement. And there it was ... the same webpage.

Ah, but these things take a little while to get going.

It was about nine minutes later that he saw this:

A jumbled, disjointed GPT never looked so good to TigerBlog.

This was a mix of the old page and the new, and it was a clear sign to TigerBlog that the process was well underway.

He refreshed and refreshed the page, and it was still processing. In the meantime, he decided to look around the web a little and come back to see if progress had been made.

Much to his surprise, he found out that the Kansas City Royals had rallied to defeat the Oakland A's in the American League wildcard game. TigerBlog had seen some of the game, and the Royals trailed 7-3 when he last looked.

He clicked on the highlights on ESPN.com and found that KC had rallied with three in the eighth and one in the ninth before falling behind in the 12th and rallying yet again with two to win 9-8.

TigerBlog can't say that he has always been a Royals fan. He can say that he rooted hard for them in the 1970s, when it seemed like they played the Yankees in the playoffs every year. And one of his all-time favorite players was George Brett.

Anyway, after checking on that, and seeing some basic news headlines and of course seeing Doonesbury and Dilbert - TigerBlog loves that Doonesbury is rerunning all of its classic old strips and Dilbert is usually good for a laugh - TB went back to the webpage and found this:

Almost all the way there.

Then it was time to play the Jumble. TigerBlog loves the Jumble. Plays it every day. This morning he got the four jumbles and the riddle in 26 seconds. His all-time record is 10 seconds. Here's the proof:

Aren't screen shots wonderful things?

Then it was back to the webpage. For some reason, TB forgot to take a screen shot of the process when it was about 75 percent done.

At this point, the main stories had loaded on the front page, but there was no menu on top. And the social media accordion feed had only loaded Twitter.

You'll have to take his word for this.

So then it was back to looking around a little. TigerBlog went to the New York Post and the New York Daily News online. He loves to compare the two, as they see the world from slightly different viewpoints, one far right (Post) and the other far left (News), and they do so without apology.

His favorite writer between the two papers is Manish Mehta, who covers the Jets for the Daily News and who used to work in the Office of Athletic Communications a long time ago.

Then it was back to the webpage, and TB found that it was completely done, after about 40 minutes. This is what it's supposed to look like:

The last thing to fully load was in fact the social media accordion. This is what that part of the page looks like:

And that was it for the screen shots.

So okay, what is up with the new page?

TigerBlog likes it because of its simplicity and cleaner, less cluttered look. Let's face it, the old look was comfortable and it worked well, but it was a bit busy, no?

There are bigger pictures on the new page, with six stories that scroll through the top. There are five videos underneath the six stories.

Among the new features, TB loves the social media accordion. How does this work?

There are the tabs for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TigerBlog (of course) and the E-newsletter. If you click on one of those tabs, it'll replace the one there at the time as the expanded one. If you click on another that one will become the new one.

This is easier to demonstrate with another screen shot. See the above one, where the Twitter feed is visible? This is what you get when you click on, oh, let's go with, TigerBlog:

You can see how the Twitter feed now vanishes and the blog feed is visible.

Oh, you can also see another great feature of the new page here. The menu stays locked into place when you scroll down the page, so you can still access the items there.

Speaking of the menu, the new site features the "mega-menu" where you can go directly to each team's roster, schedule, news and social media pages.

And what else? There's the bar across the middle that has information on Princeton Athletic history. There are the tabs on the right side of the page that also direct you to social media, as well as ticketing, livestats, video and of course the blog.

There is also the "trending now" section, underneath the top six stories. This allows a certain number of stories to stay locked onto the front page without clogging up the six that rotate. This is another feature TigerBlog loves.

Anyway, the goals were to clean up the clutter, give it a fresh coat of paint as it were. And to add some better navigational ideas.

Most of these were stolen from other school's sites, by the way, but don't tell them. And they were molded to the specific needs of Princeton, with its 38 teams and other unique challenges and needs.

TigerBlog is pretty happy with the final product. He's sure there's a bug or two in there that needs to be worked out in the next few hours and days, but hopefully those are minimal.

In the meantime, it's goodbye to the old look, one that served well for the last 10 years.

Now it's the new-look, new-and-improved GPT.

Enjoy it.