Exploring The New Amazin' Avenue: Layout Options

Greetings, Amazin' Avenue community:

We've heard your feedback regarding our new site layout, and we greatly appreciate the honesty and constructive feedback. 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 just our name for the arrangement of stories at the top of the page. We have a number of different ways to display content in the Cover, and we're going to walk you through those options and work together to figure out how to best use them.

First, a quick note: the content we put in the Cover is all recent content. While the posts may not always be arranged perfectly in chronological order, if it's something new that we've published, it will almost always stay in the cover for some time. We may rearrange things a bit throughout the day, and we'll probably feature huge stories, breaking news, and tremendous feature content for longer periods of time, but generally all of the latest stories will be in the Cover. Below the cover, the stories will typically flow in reverse chronological order just like before.

At all events, unless something has gone horribly wrong we will rarely have a situation where the Cover includes something older than a day or two. When you come to the homepage, you're almost always going to see the newest content at the top, it's just that now we have some flexibility to prioritize that content.

As for the Cover, we have five different layout options to choose from, and the editors here are still trying to figure which ones work best for particular types of content. Here are the different options we have.

1. Five Up

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

In this instance, we're featuring a StoryStream for the Mets-Pirates game, as well as highlighting TWISNY, Mets Morning News, This Date In Mets History, and Pick 6. These are basically our five latest stories all up top.

2. Three Up

Basically the same as Five Up except that the four right-side stories have been replaced by two stories with each given twice as much real estate as before.

Kevin Burkhardt and the morning news get some extra exposure here.

3. Four Up

This option includes a wide-angle feature on top and three smaller features below. The cropping on the top photo is tough to get right, but there are plenty of possibilities for this layout.

We can use this layout for four disparate items or for one main story and three complementary pieces of content.

4. Tryptic

Three stories of equal prominence, in this case our game coverage StoryStream, Kevin's handsome grill, and the news.

5. One Up

Just one big-ass feature. For a regular story, you'll see a photo on the left and the headline, author, and excerpt on the right. For StoryStreams, as below, you'll get a swanky breakdown of the recent stream updates.

So those are the five layout options we have to work with. How would you guys like to see them deployed? What works best for game coverage? What about breaking news stories? Please help us by sharing your thoughts.