Welcome to the new RMNB

This is the new RMNB you’re looking at. Welcome. I’d like to tell you about it!

In partnership with our friends at ArachnidWorks, we have spent the last year working on a relaunch of our website. It’s now a mobile-first, fast-performing, search-friendly, simple-and-sexy system for sending RMNB stuff to you. It will help us do more of the things you like while we do less of the things we don’t like, and it has been funded entirely by our supporters on Patreon, who are our lifeblood.

As always, RMNB remains an independent, DIY website. We are not part of a network, and we have no investors. We have no paywall. The relaunch changes none of that; it reaffirms it.

If you have any feedback about the new site, we’d love to hear it. If you would like to support RMNB on Patreon, we’d love to have you. We’re also running a survey to learn more about our audience and what they want, so if you’ve got ten minutes to spare we’d love your input. And if you want to learn more about the new site, boy do I have a lot of words for you.

RMNB launched in 2009. If you were here then, you were one of like thirty-two people, so thanks for being ride-or-die. Initially we used a version of the White House WordPress theme, which worked perfectly until people started reading on their phones. In 2016 we did a redesign, and that had been our look ever since. We made some important under-the-hood changes in 2018 – migrating from a decrepit server at our former host to WordPress cloud hosting – but what you saw up until today had basically been RMNB for the last eight years.

There were a lot of problems with the old site, which I’ll call V2. First, it was not particularly fast, and though we regularly tuned it to improve performance, it was ultimately limited by our WordPress theme. And though V2 was designed with mobile in mind, it was not designed mobile-first. As a result, our writers often had to code workarounds into their stories to make multimedia elements look nice on smaller devices. We could not always use basic elements like image captions. Embedding social media was sometimes difficult. Basically, writing was harder than it needed to be, and the audience experience wasn’t as elegant as we wished it were.

We knew we needed a new site, and here were our strategic goals for it:

1. Let the content be the star, without excessive decoration.
2. Make it easy to write and manage the site.
3. Run faster and be more friendly to search engines.
4. Prioritize reading on phones, which is how 80 percent of our readers do it.

We also had a bunch of technical requirements, like staying compliant with European privacy rules (GDPR), improving accessibility (WCAG), and integrating with analytics and ad platforms. Nerdy stuff like that.

Stylistically, we wanted to be sleeker but still more fun-looking than a grown-up news site or a buttoned-down sports publication. We wanted to focus on the layout and appearance of article pages, which is where most of our traffic is (and where you are right now). I am trying not to use jargon here, but readability is something I’m neurotic about, and it was very important in the new site.

In our articles, we use the Georgia font. It’s a serif, which means you don’t confuse a lower-case l with an upper-case I because the letters have little decorative hats and gloves and shoes on them.

Even at smaller sizes, Georgia remains easy to read, which is great since most of you use small screens. To that same purpose, we’ve adjusted how many characters fit on each line to conform with the alarming amount of usability research into that topic.

In web design, there’s a strong tendency to follow the leader, to be trendy. There’s a presumption that the big sites have invested infinite time and energy into their presentation, and therefore they are right and should be the model for everyone else. For basic look-and-feel, this causes a) a lot of sites to look the same, and b) those same sites to all look dated within a few years. The new RMNB is not immune to this, but we’ve tried to minimize the effect, especially on article pages. Along with our friends at ArachnidWorks, we looked at a bunch of different, comparable sites to figure out what we liked and what we didn’t.

For example:

• Politico has a good layout for reading articles on mobile
• Defector’s homepage has a good hierarchy and navigation options
• Vox displays article metadata nicely and recommends stories effectively

These sites and more like them helped us figure out what we wanted to emulate – and what we didn’t.

On an industry level, there are some common problems that are essentially solved, so imitating the big guys is a good way to save time and headache. But there are other problems where the solutions are peculiar to the organizations that selected them. For example, unlike a major outlet like The Athletic, RMNB doesn’t have dedicated, independent web editors to manage a homepage of disparate streams of stories (note: I’m trying very hard not to use the word content here). RMNB is just a team of people working together to write and review each other’s stories, and then they all go in a single big pipe and out to the website and the readers. We needed a simple mechanism to control which stories get featured, and we needed to make the decision to feature a story a part of the writing process itself, rather than a parallel meta-process that would require vigilance and coordination. That’s how our “Trending” bar operated in V2, and we didn’t want to repeat that.

On that same front, lots of big publications make feature decisions for mercenary reasons rather than to just serve the users. Substack, for example, will show a share popup every time you highlight text.

But some users like to highlight text as they go to help them scan, so the “share” popup gets in the way, running contrary to what those users want. To that point, a big part of our new site was deciding what not to do. We chose not to create overhead for homepage management, and we chose not to make WordPress brittle with lots of customizations, and we chose not to add flashy functionality to articles that might interfere with reading.

Reading is like 99 percent of the site, and we wanted a better sense of continuity for it. We have improved our tagging system, so there are now dedicated hubs for special topics like the Hershey Bears and Alex Ovechkin. We’re writing more stories that are not specifically time-bound, like the list of every goalie Ovechkin has scored on, and we’ll be adding more in the future. We’ve improved our social sharing options, and we’ve added suggestions for more reading after an article is done.

To keep file sizes small, the new RMNB converts images to AVIF, a relatively new file format that compresses pictures better than JPG. Search engines are black boxes, but it seems that Google likes AVIF. Your browser and your devices like it too, though I admit it can be a pain if you want to download a copy and do stuff with it on your machine. That’s an unfortunate tradeoff.

These functional and design solutions only work when paired with good authoring. Making RMNB readable also means we do common-sense style guide stuff, like bolding player names; using lots of bulleted lists; avoiding jargon; including links and citations; and writing in short, single-idea paragraphs. (We also give ourselves license to break these rules, especially when it’s funny, but also when writing more discursively, which I do a lot.) In one sense, the new RMNB is doing trying visually what we already do verbally.

Over the summer we approached ArachnidWorks, a local marketing and design firm, to help us out with this challenge. We came with our list of problems, goals, and requirements – plus a warning that me and Ian would be impossible – and still they said, “Sounds great! Let’s do it!”

Between August and now, AW made the plan, designed the site, and built the actual thing. We would like to thank Drew Ahrens, Mike Apicella, Monica Kolbay, and Brian Kolbay at AW for their hard work, passion, and patience. This didn’t have to be a fun process, but you made it fun anyway. Tell your dogs we said hello.

We’d also like to thank KO, who has been our technical consultant for many years. V2 was a thorn in his paw for a long time, and the new RMNB needed his direction to bring it to life. KO, we’d be lost without you. Like, literally. RMNB would have melted down in 2018 if not for you. This is not even a metaphor.

RMNB runs on and is hosted by WordPress, on the Creator tier. Our theme is custom, based on Understrap, which uses the Bootstrap front-end framework . We do not use WordPress’s block editor, which is bad. For various performance, security, and backup functions, we use Jetpack and Akismet. Our comments are powered by Disqus. We use Google Analytics, and we serve ads through Google as well.

The new RMNB was 100-percent funded by our supporters on Patreon. If you’re a supporter, you are keeping the lights on for us; thank you for letting us exist. If you’re thinking about being a supporter, even a $1 monthly subscription would offset using an adblocker. If you subscribe at the $10 level, you’ll be in our Discord server, where we share ideas for stories and power-rank cheeses. We’d like to extend an extra thanks to those members of #crashers who helped us beta test the site, but please stop saying “expected by whom?” in the chat.

If you have any comments or questions about the new site, please share them below. If you’d like to get in touch with us directly, we have a page for that. We’re also running a survey to learn more about our audience and what you like, so if you have ten minutes, we would love to hear from you.

Thank you. 🐿️