Site regulars may have noticed over the weekend that a new story section had popped up, pinned to the front page just over to the left of the FanPosts and bellow the pretty pictures that make up the The Liverpool Offside's front cover.
We're calling it The Liverpool Onside, and it's compendium of fanshots and short, fun items of a shareable nature. It'll mainly house items that are light, nougaty, and heavy on embedded items—Tweets, Vines, Youtube videos, and the like. Which maybe sounds a touch dismissive but totally isn't because we all pretty much love that sort of stuff. We already share it on the TLO Twitter every now and then, but it in general we've always felt that sort of content doesn't really have a place on the site.
We like to think we can be fun and funny at times above the fold on TLO, but Mario Balotelli ironing his shirt or cool Gatorade ads about Liverpool's triumph in Istanbul have always been the sorts of things that maybe get batted around the comments and that's it. Or we'll share them on Twitter. Or, if we're feeling super motivated, we might get them into a FanShot.
Now, we're going to have an area of the site specifically for that sort of thing, and we'll be getting some help keeping it populated from Rob Usry, a social media specialist who's going to be helping a few SBNation footy sites—ourselves along with Cartilage Free Captain and We Ain't Got No History—establish similarly minded sub-sections, sub-sections that could end up looking a bit like SBNation's LookIt over on the front page of the network. Or that could end up looking totally different.
Whatever happens, the goal is fun, light, and nougaty in all the best ways—and a little off to the side, leaving TLO to continue to be TLO while allowing us a place to share some of the stuff we might previously have passed along only on Twitter or down at the bottom of the front page in a FanShot. So. That's The Liverpool Onside. Right over there. Or here if you're lazy.