The New BOTO
We told you it was coming! Break Out The Oreos has now been totally revamped as a part of our effort to take our favorite pet website to the “next level.” We apologize for the extended downtime that it took to implement the new site design, but we think that the new site will prove to be more than worth the wait. Some highlights of the new site that may not be immediately apparently to our users:
Content
Our content is now divided into four (actually five) distinct sections, each of which either has or will soon have its own editor and dedicated writers: Arts & Entertainment, News & Politics, Business & Tech(nology), and Culture & Lifestyle. The mysterious fifth category is the Videos section, which will feature our original comedy sketches (and other such multimedia content). As of this writing, we currently have both the Arts & Entertainment and News & Politics sections running at full steam, while the others are currently in various stages of development.
Each section will contain a weekly roundup of things happening in that area; for instance, our already-established “Around the Hill” roundup will serve this purpose for the News & Politics section. Also publishing on a weekly basis will be our already-recurring “Odds and Ends” roundup, which doesn’t neatly fit into any category exactly because of its miscellany-oriented purpose.
We’re also planning on developing recurring columns in each of the sections, but we’ll address those when they’ve transitioned out of the developmental stage.
Community
We’ve taken great strides toward creating a more immersive community experience here at BOTO. The first big change is that you now must be a registered user in order to comment on posts. Registering is a pretty painless process (username, password, email, and done), and we feel that this is a step we needed to take in order to improve the site’s dialogue.
The perks of registering, though, go way deeper than just the ability to comment. Users can now customize their profiles, which can be accessed by clicking their username wherever it’s found on the website (such as comments on articles).
Sharing
We’re on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. This you know by now. We’ve made sharing our content with your friends even easier with our “share tower” in the upper-left corner of each article (including this one). Not only does the share tower allow you to see the article’s performance on Digg (our preferred social bookmarking site) and Twitter—by clicking or hovering over the “share” button, you can easily share our content over dozens of websites and methods, including Facebook, email, and Tumblr.
Break Out The Oreos is essentially in a grassroots stage as far as marketing goes, and we’ve benefited mightily from our users sharing our content on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg. We thank you for doing so, and appreciate your help in growing our website and audience from the ground up.
Advertising
It was going to happen eventually; while we do have the luxury of being able to develop BOTO without expecting to rake in huge (or even small) amounts of cash, we are beginning to look for ways to monetize our content. Yes, there are going to be ads around the site. No, they will not be big, obnoxious, spammy, distasteful, or harmful to your browser/computer. We’re currently working on securing advertisers whose ads will fit with the content and purpose of the website; until then the “ad slots” will remain empty. We value our users and their time, and the last thing we want to do is turn our website into an irritation rather than a destination.
Conclusion
In an effort to get the site back up as soon as possible, we’ve relaunched without fully flushing out all of the features and sections of the site; BOTO should be working fine, but may not be as polished or complete as it should be. We’ll be working on fixing these things, and hope to have the new-look BOTO fully functional over the next couple of days.
If you find problems or bugs with the site, feel free to leave a note of them in the comments section of this post. We’ll fix and/or explain them as we go.
"BOTO Staff" is the moniker that the Break Out The Oreos writers use when they feel like using the royal we. Which really means that this post was probably written by one or more of these people.
