As we enter the heavy design season for 2014, our Site Development team will be releasing a mini-series of all the cool features we have made available in the past few years. We hope that everyone signing on for a redesign or a new site in 2014 will not only take advantage of what is already out there, but push the limits even further!

I love overseeing all the site launches because of all the innovative design ideas that are brought up. Since we custom build every site, we really want to do something creative and fresh for everyone. That's especially true for the area that almost all of you spend the most time on: releases. Whenever we implement a new story rotator, we make sure to push them to being system provided. Regardless of whether you launched your site three years ago or just last week, you are going to get the most up-to-date features we release.

Responsive design will allow us to bring these rotator ideas to all devices in a custom way instead of just spitting out the same standard rotator idea across all sites. The way I look at it, if you are coming up with an innovative idea to display your releases, why would you want it to not have an innovative look where most of your sites traffic is coming from?

So in closing, on your redesign or new site launch, if you are ready to move away from that standard 600 x 400 pixel main story image with five thumbnails underneath, take a look at some of our new story rotator ideas in the gallery below which feature:

• Enhanced stats line scores
• Related links from the Network
• Promotional graphic inserted into the story rotator
• Access to play video, click to go to release and see it all on the release page!
• Variations of thumbnails, icons and different shapes to represent how many stories there are to see
• Horizontal and vertical photo rotators
• Rotators to support photos of all sizes
• Slide through more stories than what shows at first glance

Story Rotator Layouts