Cosmetic Upgrades

In lieu of a new post today, I decided instead to spend my time on a few much-needed cosmetic upgrades for Twins Chatter. Simply put, the site was getting extremely stale. It was a very plain site to begin with, but after 10 months I was getting sick of seeing the same drab lettering over and over.

Overall, I've tried to simplify things a bit. Gone are all the funky, multi-colored lines, and gone is the super long marquee "Twins Chatter: A Better Way for Twins Fans". I assume those of you with older Macs or low-resolution monitors couldn't even fit those words on one line of your screen, let alone the equally tedious blog description below it ("Your source for insightful, thoughtful, and somewhat opinionated Minnesota Twins coverage..."). So they are gone. I know it seems like there is a lot of empty space up there, but that will change within the next few days. I'm in the process of creating a banner that will incorporate our official logo (what you see above) with some photos of Twins players. I'm still a Photoshop novice, but hopefully it will turn out well in the end.

Anyway, the otherwise hardly-noticable changes are the result of a couple hours' work tinkering with my Blogger template. I flirted with the idea of starting from scratch and creating a whole new site using Macromedia Dreamweaver but the complexity of the software and the cost of server space pretty much squashed that idea. It is possible to have a pretty decent looking site using Blogger, so I've decided instead to work with what I have.

I know you all didn't come here today to read my ramblings about the appearance of the site, so I'll provide a little teaser for tomorrow. I've decided that my next string of posts will deal with the Twins minor league system/prospects, which is a topic near and dear to my heart. Baseball America recently finished naming their 100 Top Prospects, and to mark the spirit of the occasion I've decided to follow suit in the coming days. Keep checking back over the course of the next week or so as the series gets started.

-Ryan M.
twinsfan21@msn.com