At 12:01 Wednesday morning, the Binghamton Athletics Department unveiled a newly redesigned athletics Web site that is aesthetically pleasing, allowing for more video and graphics to be displayed, in addition to other benefits.

The site has also changed addresses, moving from athletics.binghamton.edu to bubearcats.com.

The Web site is redesigned on a small, superficial scale annually by webmaster Elsan Dzudza, a Binghamton University alum and former BU soccer player, but this year’s revision presented a major overhaul. The site has been moved to a larger, five-gigabyte server, freeing up more space to provide flashier visuals and give advertising partners more ways to communicate with browsers.

“We were confined a little bit by the University’s server,” said John Hartrick, BU’s director of sports information. “This new bubearcats.com has given us a lot more flexibility in terms of what content we put on the site.”

Though the new design does look better already, not all links and features are fully functional just yet. As an example, at the top of the page there is a link titled “Departments” that, when clicked on, brings the user to a “404 Not Found” page.

“I’ve sort of alerted our coaches and our parents and alumni that have called to sort of bear with us, and give us about a week to try to get everything moved over and to sort of scour the site ourselves and try to find any links that are not live yet,” Hartrick said.

Transferring from server to server was a tedious task, as over 1,000 files had to be moved individually.

Gone is the drop-down menu of teams on the left side of the page, which has been replaced by a separate list of men’s and women’s teams in the top right corner. Also, enhanced and more prominently advertised is the new Bearcats merchandise site, which can be found at bearcatshopping.com.

The Athletics Department plans to include more audio links, features and interviews of players and coaches, and, down the road, video links. The new server, more so than in the aesthetic changes, which vary year-to-year, is where the Athletics Department really improved the site.

There is no direct cost associated with the new Web site, as any cost is associated with the time and services Dzudza provided.

“The design of the whole look of the [site] is his masterpiece,” Hartrick said.

Though not perfected yet, Bearcats fans can already enjoy the improvements made to a Web site that, even before the upgrade was functional, and is now even more so.

“It’s mostly just trying to be as thorough as possible and give people as much information, both written and graphically, as you can,” Hartrick said.