4 ms·
Ask HN: Are Sports Sites Outdated or Am I Not the Audience?
Major sites like espn.com and foxsports.com are ugly and too busy for me. Minor sites I've come across are similar.
What's the reason for this? Is it just me? Does the nature of their content force them to present information this way? Are there other knowledge areas with similar requirements to which I can compare them?
- russell 17y agoI have to believe it's you (and me:-). Most people are attracted to images more than texts. espn.com is rich in images and the text is low density. Otherwise it is reasonably clean and not too garish. I suspect that a lot of money went into the design and testing. US Today took the same approach to image rich design when it came out. It was criticized for looking more like a tabloid than a newspaper, but it quickly jumped to number 2 or 3.
- alanthonyc 17y agoIt's true that compared to sports illustrated, espn is relatively text-sparse. But it's there, and in sufficient quantities. But it's not just the fact that the front page is image rich. It's that it's image crowded. Is this really the best way to present this info? Now that I think about it, when I compare espn to other news-centric sites (albeit in other fields) like politico.com and cnn.com, there are a lot of similarities. So maybe it's not necessarily just a sports related issue.
- russell 17y agoMaybe the idea is to put as much of the high traffic links as possible on the page without scrolling, like newspapers put the important stories above the fold.
- mahmud 17y agoWho visits sports websites?
- joeycfan 17y agoThey drop the coin on state-of-the-art sites - the SOTA is a bit dumb right now, thats all.