Football Frontier
 

http://www.footballfrontier.com

I'd like to invite everyone to visit the new Football Frontier, which is an online football magazine I'll be updating throughout the season.

Some of the material may be familiar to those who have followed Solecismic Software over the years. But I'm going to be focusing more on information presentation, as well as a blog I hope to update regularly with analysis, game previews and fantasy football tips.

cool Jim

looks like it will be chock-full of statistical goodness.

Very cool, I'll have to bookmark that.

Very interesting.

I think the blog in particular will be fascinating to read.

Dola:

How often should we expect blog updates?

I have some friends to whom I want to show this.

But I am thinking that, strategically, I am going to wait until the new season starts. If I give people this link now, then they will say "Oh, that is all last year's numbers. I'll check it out when the new season starts." And then they will forget about it.

If, however, I wait until the new season starts, then they will be more likely to use and enjoy it at the time that I send the link, meaning that they may actually remember that the link exists next time they log on.

Excellent point.

That's a good idea. I'll be waiting to pass this info on as well...

Good stuff, I'm just in the middle of a fantasy draft and some of the info could be valuable like the players analysis. Will keep reading every week.

Just to throw a critic between all the praises. I bet you saw it coming... the site design... I know you care way more about the meat than about the look... but with the huge offer of websites in the net, a good design (and i don't mean with fancy graphics) is what sells a site, specially for first time visitors that haven't ever heard about your statistical and programming work before. If they don't like the site at all, they won't even give you the chance of reading your content no matter how good it is.

You know that already, but you also know that the analysis is great and we are saying it too, so i think that reading critics will help as much as reading praises.

Cool, I'll check it out.

i agree. i just didn't want the first post to be like "aaarggh the graphics"

i'm sure there's any number of guys here who would be willing to graphically enhance the site (note: not me i have no such skills)

Agreed. I think 80% (or more) of the people will load the site and immediately browse away, never to return.

Best of luck with this Jim, this seems like a good way to draw people in, where they might after that take a look at FOF. Nice idea for attracting new customers.

I'm not going to hammer on the look of the sites, but I will give two small ideas:

1. Use a consistent font. The blog hops between what looks like arial for headlines, and times for the text. These two are pretty distinct, and maybe a little too much so. I'd either go with all arial, or arial for the main text and something a little different (wider maybe) for the headers. Times is probably the single biggest thing that makes sites appear old...it's just not used much anymore online.

2. For your calendar, it is a little hard to discern which dates have entries. I can tell that there is a change in font, but I think color would be a more visible cue here.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000834.html

All I'm saying is if he has it there for the purpose of seeing which dates have entries, it should work in that function.

(and actually...I *have* personally used calendars on sites - Sports Guy's for instance. But I guess those are posted more as articles than as blog entries, and don't follow all on the same page)

I know. :) I just read that post recently and it popped into my head. There is good advice in there in general, I think. I know my "blog" always has a "sorry it's been so long since I've posted" post, which is incredibly annoying and lame.

Just a thought here: I'd think that anyone who would turn away from the site because of the look of it is also extremely unlikely to give FOF a chance once they see the interface. A site redesign without an interface redesign seems like a big waste of time. And Solecismic Software seems to have made it fairly clear that a major interface redesign isn't in the cards any time soon:

1993 called and they want their website back.

Good detail, bad presentation.

Booooo!


I like it Jim... Looks familiar? Can you share your inspiration for the layout? :cool:

I'll admit, I did sorta cringe when I saw the site design. No one is talking a massive redesign, but heck..that's not even up to blogger or wordpress template standard.

And that's not a knock, but...it's just one of those things. I think this is a potentially awesome new development and it would be to see it reach its niche audience more fully. It's not that hard, as others have already said.

i would use his site for fantasy football purposes, no doubt.


but yes, the site is a little outdated to put it mildly and could use a little sprucing up. no developement time need be wasted - templates can be quickly downloaded and used.

I think the problem here is that I disagree with what makes "clean, simple interfaces." My definition of clean and simple does not mean "no graphics" there is more to it than that. As to not giving FOF a chance, I think that if people find a site with great statistics that they often visit, they are more likely to try FOF. If you can pull in more customers through a blog that many people visit, that's a win. If you're just bringing in your current customers, that doesn't seem to meet the goals. In my view, a site that draws people in is more likely to gain new customers, regardless of what FOF looks like. Whether you think it's stupid for someone to turn away from the site based on the way it looks, these are the facts.

I know someone that runs an ecommerce site. They made one single change that doubled their purchases. The change was merely to make the items in the left-hand navigation right-aligned rather than left-aligned. People don't seem to realize just how important the looks and feel of a website is nor how important it is to the bottom line.

Site design matters. Whether you want to believe it or not, it matters.

hxxp://www.templatemonster.com

Tough crowd.

hxxp://hypem.com/track/356671

Not really, I think people just expect a site to live up to the average technology of today.

Are people talking about the site itself, or specifically the blog?

The blog is built into my hosting plan, and has its quirks, but it will save me an enormous amount of time when posting entries. I basically choose the colors and that's about it - can't even highlight previous days in the calendar with entries, which seems absurd.

Is it easy to find a professional-looking blog that gives me the ability to add new entries as easily as posting in this forum, for example? Without losing the speed and reliability of my web host?

I agree this one does look like a bit of an afterthought.

I've always had three rules about web site design:

1) It must work on both mozilla and ie.

2) It must work without javascript, flash or cookies.

3) It must work without pictures.

Before I had high-speed internet, I surfed with automatic image loading off. Even as late as last year, I could tell from my site statistics that a small percentage, maybe 5-10%, still did. It may be time to remove rule 3 from the list, but I'm not certain about that.

WordPress.

i used this when i ran my shortlived blog. very easy and most of the templates are slick and clean looking. and it's completely free.

WordPress Themes/Templates, just to give you an idea as to the different looks your blog can have. all look like they were created post 1998. i don't know if that's too wild and crazy for you.

Both.


I agree with Hell Atlantic. Word Press is excellent, and there are others out there that are good as well (even blogger would be better). The question is what your web host supports, and we obviously don't know what that is. :) Word Press (and most blogging software out there) is PHP. Word Press probably has the most themes available that I'm aware of. There are the ones HA linked, plus Template Monster, and several other large sites.


Here is where the barrier in communication seems to be. I (and others I believe) that make comments about the look of the site are not asking you to violate any of these rules. This is a fact that is constantly ignored by people that say we are being harsh or trying to make things too flashy or whatever. I strongly believe in all of the above rules. In fact, some of my complaints about this and previous HTML issues (such as FOF exports) are largely because of how rules #1 and #3 are broken by said HTML. A clean, simple, attractive design is obtainable while still sticking to your core requirements. If anything, current design principles are based on reducing images and excessive HTML bloat while increasing compatibility for not only all desktop browsers, but mobile customers as well.

Dola:

Here are two links I would recommend:

1) http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/...tyle-guide.cfm -- This site is a little trendy, and has a lot of information about images. However, there are a lot of points in here that apply. And, even if some of these seems "image heavy", I don't think there are (m)any more images than on your current site. The key is to use CSS techniques that gracefully handle a lack of images. I also think that you can follow most of these suggestions using no graphics whatsoever. In particular: #1-6,8,9,10

2) http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006...ern-solutions/ - This is a good read for where you have all of your statistical information.

Those are still good rules.

Rule #1 - ok, but always choose IE over mozilla.

Rule #2 - You are very much like some of the old school programmers that work for me. But, if you can increase functionality I would strike Rule #2 from your list. You can make a site more functional and attractive by adding in JScript or Flash. It is very common all over the web.

Rule #3 - Graphics are king. I know I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but graphics can enhance a site greatly. It is a rare person these days that doesn't use graphics on a webpage.

Rule 1 - Don't choose one over the other - especially with IE7 coming closer to honing to web standards, designing a page for standards and tweaking for the browsers is the way to go.

Rule 2 - Nothing wrong with javascript, but if it all possible, a page should be designed to work without it - in other words, feel free to use it, but make sure that the page works without it turned on.

Rule 3 - A good designer will make sure a page is graphically nice...and is completely readable and functional without the graphics turned on.

This page is crippled in its design and doesn't have to be.

If a site is programmed largely in Flash, it can be cool. (here is an example of a site one of our FOxLers linked: hxxp://www.rockwerchter.be/RW2007/fase2/live.asp).

If Flash is used just as a neat splash intro I would see absolutely no need for it, especially here. I cannot find and hit the "skip intro" button fast enough for those.

Oh, and FF has grown steadily and shouldn't be ignored:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Considering the number of people who use Mozilla and the no-script/no-flash plugins, avoiding javascript and flash seems like a decent plan...especially for a site like this that doesn't need them. Cleaner graphics would help, but that is a fairly minor update.

So should I drop the AJAX stuff???

:D

What number of people is that?


Good luck with the site Jim. I hope one day you jazz up your sites and game. I will definately be using it though, some good statistics there.

Not at all. :) I just feel that whatever is done in AJAX should be usable without. And, for our stuff, it's only 3-4 people using it and we know they can easily support AJAX. But the key distinction is "the site will function without javascript" rather than "the site has no javascript." I definitely see an exception for administrative interfaces with a very finite userbase.

Jim,

I just looked again and it seems you are already using Word Press. You should be able to upload a theme and load it through the WP admin interface.

It must be an early version of WordPress that's been customized for my host. They call it SiteBlog2, and there are 20 existing templates, just variations of the same theme. No place to upload a template.

I'm looking into WordPress.

Would you mind if I emailed you asking about specifics with regard to your comments?

content reminded me of some of the stuff the old tv/internet bookies would be spouting: "SF is 19-3 on road turf games against a bottom 10 defense!!! ULTRA FORT KNOX BOX IRON CLAD STEELY DAN LOCKBOX SEAL OF THE WEEK!"

My reason for saying it's wordpress is that that the login is "wp-admin.php", which is the login for wordpress. It's highly likely that is both old and customized. :)

I would welcome PMs, emails or IMs. You can email me at lordscarlet (at) idledreams.net and my IM information should be available (except for gtalk, which is lordscarlet (at) gmail.com) via the board.

I know some WOOF owners who will be mighty mad if you do a redesign on Solecismic properties before you get cracking on the WOOF site. :D

*snicker*

:)

Three new blog entries last night with Fantasy Football notes.

Site redesign.