Check Out The New CentralTrack.com.
So, uh, something’s different around here, huh?
Yeah, you bet your ass. Lots of things, actually.
What you’re looking at right now is the new and improved Central Track — a months-in-the-making undertaking that we could not be more excited to finally share with our readers.
The changes you’ll see by clicking around this new design are plentiful.
First and foremost, this new look features a fully responsive layout — an implementation that should immediately and vastly improve our site’s user experience across devices of all shapes and sizes, but particularly on mobile devices. Considering a good 70 percent of y’all tend to look at our site on your phones and tablets, upping our game in that regard had been a must for some time — and, honestly, we appreciate your patience in waiting so long for us to get our act together on that front!
Another massive upgrade? Our Events Directory, which, along with our daily Things To Do posts, has been built to help you better experience all that goes on around Dallas on a daily basis.
The new design is also built to help you better discover our content — through the menus at the top of each page, through our real-time search bars and through the “recent posts” addition you’ll now find at the bottom of our stories. Similarly, each of our section pages have been more fully fleshed out so you can find our archives and previous pieces more easily.
Other updates include new formats for our video and slideshow posts.
But, really, everything has changed. This is a faster, deeper and just supremely more capable site — and one that, thankfully, does not come at the expense of the highly visual direction we’ve spent the last four and a half years cultivating. Its creation comes thanks to our incredibly talented friends and partners at Dallas’ own White Pants Agency, who not only helped us come up with the new direction but built the damn thing from the bottom up too. And, let me tell you, transferring over to this look the 8,000 or so articles and 50,000 or so images from our archives alone was no easy task.
One hundred percent, they’re the real MVPs of this new layout.
Really, though, we have tons of people to thank. First and foremost, we’d like to thank everyone who showed up to our relaunch party on Saturday night at RBC in Deep Ellum to celebrate this milestone, and the performers — Herrick & Hooley, Ronnie Heart, Penguin Prison and DJ Sober — who served as the night’s entertainment. (Check out some photos from Kathy Tran of the party at the top of this page!)
Secondly, we’d like to thank all of our advertisers who’ve helped support us in getting to this point; please click show them love by clicking on their ads!
And last but not least, we’d like to thank all of our readers. We say this a lot, but we truly mean it: Central Track would not be able to exist, and certainly would not be in a position to build and unveil this new site, were it not for your unwavering support. Y’all are coolest motherfuckers around, and we love the ever-loving shit out of you.
Honestly, this entire redesign is all about y’all. You put up with our flawed earlier design for four and a half years, for crying out loud. It’s about time we did what we could to make our content easier for you to consume.
We won’t make you wait so long the next time, we swear. In fact, we won’t make you wait very long at all. Here’s the most exciting part of this new Central Track you’re looking at: This is just Phase One of our improvements. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be unveiling new Neighborhoods and Places directories to further help you discover all that Dallas has to offer. There’ll also be more implementations and tweaks coming to our Events Directory — including some added elements that could help make sure you don’t miss that next big event that the entire city will be talking about. There are other additions and changes coming, too — and we’ll no doubt be sure to hip you to those as they come.
In the meantime, we encourage you to click around and play with all of the new changes laid out above, and to let us know what you think of it by reaching out to us through our new, more streamlined means of contacting us.
The next chapter of Central Track is officially underway, y’all. And it’s gonna fucking rule.