A New Look for UCDavisAggies.com

Every so often you have to move the couch and the TV to different places in the family room, if for no other reason than to give the room a fresh look. When it comes to www.ucdavisaggies.com, well, we've done just that.

If you haven't been over to the athletics website lately, then take a minute and give it a look. We hope you like what you see. That's because for the past few months we've been moving around the furniture, bringing a few new pieces in and giving our "room" a new look. Thanks to our partners at CBS Collegiate Sports, the website launched earlier today.

We think it's got a cleaner and crisper look. We've added better accessibility for our social media efforts, made it easier for fans to navigate to our 23 teams' homepages, rosters, news, schedules and social media. We've improved the schedule on our main page to give us better opportunities to post links to results, live audio and live video. 

The new www.ucdavisaggies.com website

With the re-launch, we plan to build on some of the bells and whistles you see. We're putting more emphasis on social media, plan to incorporate more multimedia and enhance all the other areas you've come to rely on for the latest in UC Davis Aggies news.

From a practical standpoint, those of us in the athletics communications office are happy for some not-so-apparent reasons. One of the big ones involves the main photos on each page. The "old" website had a built-in gradient on the left side which meant we had to post photos that were oriented more on the right. That chore is gone.

Overall we're happy with the site and hope you are too. We've been partners with CBS College Sports for more than a decade. CBS manages websites for many of the major athletics programs in the country such as those at USC, UCLA, Stanford and others. We like that association.

We're still tinkering with things and will undoubtedly be fine-tuning areas as we see them. The process began in early March with a conference call between our office, our designers and the CBS design crew. Mockups followed a few weeks later and then it became a process of exchanging ideas, changes, etc. We signed off on the final design a few weeks ago and since then CBS has been building the site with today's launch date as the deadline. We've spent most of today making last-minute adjustments. 

We're not done yet but we hope you like what you see right now.

Mike Robles is assistant athletics director for athletics communications. Thank you to his staff of Mark Honbo, Eric Bankston and Joe Waltasti for their help in the redesign. Big thanks to designer extraordinare Cameron Hughes from UC Davis Athletics and also Scott Brayton, assistant athletics director for marketing and promotions. Many thanks to all the great folks at CBS College Sports as well.