Welcome To The Aggship 2.0

As you might have already noticed, it's been a big month behind the scenes here at The Aggship. This is our fourth season providing coverage of Utah State athletics, and it was time for the outlet to grow out of its initial stages into something bigger and better.

So, what's new, what's old, and what's still to come?

• Branding! Our old look served its purpose well, but it was always intended more as a stopgap than a comprehensive design for the outlet. Ultimately, our expertise is in writing, and we needed some outside help to make The Aggship look its best. We partnered with local graphic designer and Utah State alumnus Bryson King, who set us up with a brand-new portfolio of logos, wordmarks, patterns and graphics, along with the site's first-ever typography and color palette guidelines. You'll be seeing these changes across The Aggship's online footprint, be it on this site and within stories, on social media profiles, or even on The Aggship Podcast, which was previously without anything even resembling a logo.
• Another big part of our collaboration with Bryson was in the design and function of The Aggship's website. We've changed the theme and general look of the site and added a bunch of features we've long wanted to include:
• On the home page, you'll still see all of our latest posts, followed by specific story categories for football, basketball, Olympic sports, film reviews, podcasts and news. There's more to come on that front as well, like dedicated sections for Parker's women's basketball coverage and weekly Best in the West stories, and a new collection of posts from guest contributors. Sticking with that theme of accessibility, the home page also now features a search function found in the top left corner.
• Also at the top of the home page, we have revamped and significantly improved our sub-headers. The "podcast" tab now takes you directly to a feed of The Aggship Podcast's latest episodes. There's a new "photo galleries" tab for our game photography, which will repopulate with the latest after each home football, men's basketball and women's basketball game. Parker's Olympic sports photography will be featured there as well.
• Lastly among those sub-headers is the single most-requested new feature for the site: Social feeds. The Aggship's Twitter/X and Instagram feeds should now auto-populate to that page, allowing those of you without accounts on either platform to follow along with our live game coverage on Twitter/X and our game photography posts on Instagram. I'll add a small disclaimer that this feature has not yet been fully stress-tested and may need some minor tweaking, but we'll get that tuned up and fully operational as the basketball season gets underway.
• If an embedded social feed was the top request, an in-house sign-in option on the website was not far behind at No. 2. Unfortunately, we are restrained a bit in this regard by our hosting platform, Ghost. Their system is designed to work without requiring usernames and passwords and does not offer a full workaround.
• It does, however, now function on a one-time verification code system that should alleviate the frustration of our previous email-based sign-in flow. You'll still receive an email when you sign into the site, but you no longer need to go through a redirect link. Now, you'll simply receive a six-digit verification code that you can type directly into your already open browser tab.
• The newsletter service that Ghost provides is an integral part of our outlet, but we want that to be an entry point, not the only option for following along with our coverage of Utah State athletics. Many people, myself included, prefer to read stories on a web page rather than through an in-house email reader. We hope that these changes can help to bridge the gap between The Aggship as a newsletter and The Aggship as a fully fledged website.
• If you would like to take the new-look version of The Aggship for a test drive, we have you covered. Football season is heading into the final stretch, basketball season tips off on Monday night, and you can follow along for free through the month of November with The Aggship's one-month free trial, available through this link or through the button attached below.

Thank you for your support of The Aggship, the only credentialed, 100 percent independent outlet dedicated exclusively to coverage of Utah State athletics.