Welcome to the New auralwes.com
Photo credit: Max Levin
The sunsets were— purple, and red, and yellow, and on fire…
Hi there! It’s Max again — current overlord of the blog. My welcomes are due unto the New Fold: recently we marked one year since Aural Wes’s post-pandemic revival, and now we continue our celebration with a brand-new coat of purple-and-red digital paint. You’ll notice that not much has changed structurally, but alongside the visual refresh we’ve added some quality-of-life features that we think will come in handy. Here’s a quick rundown:
We switched over to Squarespace’s Skye template. It adds useful reader tools to the blog, makes it way easier for us to edit the site, and generally looks a lot nicer.
Article pages now have a separate display for our most recent posts. It’ll show up as a sidebar block for desktop readers, and for mobile viewers it’ll be at the bottom of the page.
We’ve made navigation far easier:
The Skye template uses a hamburger navigation menu. The pages in the nav bar are the same as before, but the new menu presents them a lot more elegantly.
The main Blog page now fits more than one post per row on desktop. Marvelous.
When looking at an article page, readers can click the arrow buttons (on either side of the screen on desktop, or at the bottom of page on mobile) to flip through posts.
For your convenience, our social media pages are now front-and-center in the navigation menu!
We changed the fonts and colors!
Titles and headers are now typeset in Balboa, to match all the visuals and promo I’ve made for the blog. However, everything else is typeset in Lora — meaning I have to stop using Balboa for everything. Oh well.
The main color palette for the blog is purple and red, with the background color being a light periwinkle. To make everything easier to read, article text is now black; we’ve also upped the line spacing for body text and padded out everything else across the site.
We re-tooled the home page with a bit more flair! We’ve connected our Instagram account to the website and added a slideshow block to the home page, if you want to see what we post on there. Once Weekend Previews are up and running again, we’ll add another slideshow display to the page.
There is a secret page hidden within the new website. The first on-campus Wesleyan student to find it will get a cookie.
This is not a joke. It’ll be one of the good fresh cookies. I will pay for it.To claim your crumbly prize, send us a message which includes a screenshot of the page and a sentence or two describing how you found it.
There is only one way to access the secret page. To prevent brute-forcing, the page address is a string of random characters. You’ll know when you find it.
Current Aural Wes members are not eligible. In its stead, I’ll get some cookies for the next meeting. Come to our meetings.
If you have questions, feel free as always to contact us through teamauralwes@gmail.com or the Contact Us page. Alternatively, yell at me directly and send an e-mail to mdlevin@wesleyan.edu. Thanks and enjoy!
Photo credit: Max Levin
