With the start of yet another KU football season set to kickoff tomorrow, that means it’s time for the staff at KUsports.com to start dusting off the cobwebs and trying to remember what life on game days is like.
Good news there: Things are going to be new and improved this season — at least for us.
Beginning with the KU football opener against South Dakota State — 11 a.m. Saturday at Memorial Stadium — we will be unveiling our new format for live game coverage, which promises to bring our readers a much more comprehensive look at what’s happening with the ‘Hawks on game days.
For the most part, things will be the same as they ever were in terms of the user experience. You’ll still go to KUsports.com to follow our coverage team from well before kickoff until well after the game ends. And, as was the case before, this will be your community, a user-driven environment for Jayhawk fans to come together and track the good and the bad of what’s going on with their team on the field and court.
But from this point on, the environment will have a fresh, new look and we will be able to more quickly and more easily incorporate all kinds of content from around the Internet, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and various other social media sites.
In addition, we’ll also be able to integrate live polls, threaded comments, automated Twitter feeds, video and photo slide shows and much, much more, all within the framework of a more functional and aesthetically pleasing home base. There will also be a Big 12 scoreboard pinned to the top of the stream so that everyone can follow the scores of all the day’s games.
As always, Tom Keegan, Matt Tait and Benton Smith will be providing live coverage and analysis of what’s happening in front of them and also will continue to interact with our readers throughout the games. The extra content is merely that: Bonus nuggets from others who are closely following their favorite team elsewhere.
We have been working diligently over the summer months to improve our live coverage gameday blog and make it more all-inclusive and an aggregation of more of the things going on during each game, both live from the event AND elsewhere on the web.
Some of the changes we added last year, which included placing a stream of the #kufball and #kubball Tweets and the giving you the ability to Tweet your posts from our gameday blog to Twitter, have been expanded upon this year. And one of the biggest improvements is that our live coverage will now work on your smartphone!
A great deal of the enhancements in technology are actually on the back end and make it more efficient and functional for Benton, Matt, Tom and others to be able to participate with more of their content appearing in the live stream without taking away from all the other things they have to do during the actual game.
In addition, the improvements/enhancements that we made over the summer months for all of you should allow the stream to function much more quickly and consistently no matter how many Jayhawk fans join in the fun.
We are super excited about these changes and improvements and continuing to evolve our stream of posts and comments even further as the season(s) go on, so please do not hesitate to give us your feedback and suggestions about the new set up.
See you tomorrow at the game. As always, we’ll get things fired up an hour or two before kickoff.
