Welcome to our new home!

GM's Office

Ray Murphy

Feb 4 2024 8:30am

Welcome to our new home!

Ray Murphy

Feb 4 2024

Welcome to our new web site!

This transition has been a long time in the making. We haven’t done a complete redesign on our site in 12 years. I know this well, because we launched the prior version of the site just after my twins were born. They are in middle school now… and when your web site reaches middle school age, it’s long past time for a facelift.

What we have here is actually way more than a facelift: it could more accurately be described as an organ transplant. We’ve taken the core of the old site: the metrics, the tools, our 20+ years of data; and transplanted it into a cutting-edge, modern web interface.

While this site is completely new to you today, we are a little more familiar with it: we’ve watched it getting built over the past few months, made design decisions, done some set-up work ourselves, and of course we have been testing extensively over the past few weeks. We can say confidently that what we’re launching today meets and exceeds the expectations we had when we started this project. This new platform will make it much easier for you to access our content and tools from anywhere, on any device. Additionally, the modern tools available here are going to allow us to elevate our offerings in the months and years ahead. We are incredibly excited about where we can go from here.

That doesn’t mean we have everything quite perfect here on day one: the “new home” analogy really applies, as there are definitely punch lists of items still to be addressed. One of the beauties of this new platform is that most things can be changed very quickly, and we have a responsive tech team standing by to address issues as we (and you) find them. There will inevitably be random broken links and other issues along the way, but they should be smoothed out quickly as we go forward. We do thank you for your patience as we work through the inevitable hiccups.

What’s new

There were a couple of primary motivations we had in updating the site, and this new version checks those boxes:

First and most importantly, this website is responsive to the screen you are viewing it on. It automatically adjusts from a desktop view to a mobile-friendly view, or in between. We acknowledge that we are late to this party; the rest of the internet has worked this way for ages now. But it was particularly challenging for us given how data-heavy our site is. At the heart of our new tools are some super-slick table tools. You will likely need to tinker with them a bit to get comfortable with them, but we’re finding they are an elegant and powerful solution for making our data accessible everywhere you go.

Secondly, we’ve brought our toolset right up to the cutting edge, most notably including a replacement of our last-century MACK Engine with a brand new tool called LeagueSync. Notably, this tool delivers what was far-and-away our most-requested site enhancement from subscribers: the ability to automatically sync your league rosters from your league website into our tools. So now you can easily see our projections for your entire roster, evaluate trade offers, and much more. See the accompanying Frequently Asked Questions article for more details.

(Ed note: the paint is still drying on LeagueSync, so we aren't turning it on right away. Don't worry, it's just a couple of days away, and well worth the wait.)

In our book, these are a couple of really big wins, and we’re confident you’ll agree.

What’s familiar

We understand that changes like this can be disorienting at first. We’ve taken steps to try and keep the navigation of this new site familiar to long-time subscribers. The look-and-feel of the site is undeniably different, but the organization of the content should be familiar. The top menu is organized very similarly to the old site, so you should be able to find your favorite resources there quickly. And the “This Week from Baseball HQ” section in the middle of the home page (offset in gray), carries forward the popular “Days of the week” links from the old site. So whether you visit the site religiously with your cup-o-joe each morning, or pop in every couple of days, or binge-read our content before your weekly transaction deadline… you can use that gray box to catch up on what’s new since your last visit.

Notably, wherever you start reading on the site, you should find it easier to find what you’re looking for. At the bottom of each article you’ll find a “More from…” section that shows other recent content in the same section. Each article category is also labeled with a purple “slug”, clicking on that slug will take you to a list of articles in that category. Author names are clickable too, if you want to find the latest contribution from your favorite writer. And no matter how far down the page you scroll, the top menu is always visible, always ready for your next click.

FAQs

We’ve tried to anticipate some common questions about the new site on this FAQ page, and we’ll continue to add to that page with more information based on the questions we receive. You can leave those questions in the article comments below, or in this thread in our forums (which have not changed as part of the upgrade), or you can email us at support@baseballhq.com.

Once again, welcome to our new home!