I’m about to let you in on a little secret. We here at D3sports.com have never been designers.

Our sites have never had the most modern look and they’ve never been the most well-organized, to say the least. Our layout was cluttered from the moment D3football.com launched in July 1999.

We’ve known that for some time, and for about three years now, a grand redesign had been talked about, sketched, but never quite achieved as we tried to get the entire D3sports.com network on the same page, so that we could then turn that page together. Rather than continue to fight this battle with a staff of exactly zero full-time employees, we decided to hire out.

And that’s where PrestoSports came in. They’re already the trusted home of athletics web sites at all levels, from Butler and Kent State down to high schools, with hundreds of Division III clients and more joining the network every year. (We see you there, Centennial Conference, Simpson, Swarthmore, Wooster.) We’ve already run our game day data through them for years and now their site design is on par with the rest of the Division III market.

We wanted in. And here we are, with the first of five site rollouts to come over the next few months. D3soccer.com, D3hoops.com and D3baseball.com will also get a similar makeover. D3sports.com will turn from being a placeholder site with one story and a bunch of links into a place where can also give some coverage to sports such as lacrosse, track, softball, cross country and other sports not dominated by UW-Whitewater or Mount Union.

I hope you will find everything you expect on our new site. Some of the archives are not yet brought over, but that process will continue. When I met with Presto this spring to discuss design, I told them the only thing we needed to keep was the logo, that which you see at the top of this page. From a look and feel perspective, nothing else was sacred.

And this is what we have, finally, a modern news site worthy of the fine student-athletes and great sport that we cover.

If you have questions, please drop us an email at info@d3sports.com or use our feedback form. Or since this is our blog, you can comment here at the bottom of the page.