USCHO new website

[upprdeck]

I guess going uglier is the way to go in web site design these days.


they created guessing game on who the last team in every league standings is..

[upprdeck]

flip side.. do we have some new bot code?  i tried creating a message and it was rejected for being a bot message. Do we know the rules on this new feature?

[Jim Hyla]

flip side.. do we have some new bot code?  i tried creating a message and it was rejected for being a bot message. Do we know the rules on this new feature?

Sort of same. I tried telling them that the game today was @ 4, but it was rejected.

I guess going uglier is the way to go in web site design these days.

Agree and the format seems to make it harder for me to navigate around.

[Swampy]

Dysfunction is more accurate than ugly, especially with regard to the scoreboard.

When you first select scores you see a screen with today's date, but the scores are all from earlier games: yesterday and before. Then switch to week-by-week schedule, and you do see scores for recent games associated with the appropriate dates. But the viewing area is too narrow for the underlying tables. So you have to scroll left and right to see all the columns. My MacBook Air screen has all this wasted white space to the left & right, but the data appear as if I'm looking through an arrow slot in some medieval castle.

As bad or worse, each league-specific table is independent of the others; so, for example, if you want to see all the games being televised today, you have to scroll each league table individually! Then if you switch to composite view, whatever that means, the latest stories initially overwrite the data table, making a confused jumble. After a while or after viewing something else and returning, I'm not sure which, the screen is legible, but we're back to the too-narrow viewport on the table. Once viewing the scoreboard, the only available views seem to be composite & week-by-week; the only way to see the original view, whatever it's called, is to choose "Scores" from the main menu.

And then I wanted to view a game summary of the Princeton-SCSU game. Scrolling to the right reveals the Game Summary column, but instead of using both teams as the stub so you can keep track of what game you looking for, the site only uses the visiting team's name. This might do when you're playing the #1 team, but what if you just want to look up your alma mater's recap for its home game last night and are really not sure who the opponent was?

What initially appears to be an improvement turns out to be a farce. There are game summaries for virtually every game. But it turns out most of them are little more than the boxscore translated into prose. The old Recaps at least gave more in-depth coverage, albeit typically from one team's standpoint.

Then, in what seemed to be another improvement, I noticed a sidebar with a link under "Latest Stories" for Canisius at Cornell. Thinking there would be a game preview, I clicked the link. The result was a completely unformatted screen, seems to be a site map.

Who does this sort of thing?

[upprdeck]

everyone seems to be going to more maintainable less usable formats in web design. We are being told to code in pages for easier use for those with disabilities now.. I get that there is a need for that, but you also need to know your user base.  if you create functional designs to handle some of those issues it makes the page not work for the 99.9% who will use it.   its a give and take I guess.

its makes you long for the good old days of newspapers.   you knew which section to look for things..,  web pages are coded all over, if you dont look on a certain day you never find the story you might have read.

[upprdeck]

uscho responded that its now a responsive site because 70% of users uses tablets and phones on weekends.  they say all issues are from using old browsers.

[upprdeck]

did the forums go away on that site too?

[Trotsky]

I guess going uglier is the way to go in web site design these days.


they created guessing game on who the last team in every league standings is..

Everything is optimized for the pacifiers, ahem, smart phones.  As designs go this one is pretty benign.

[upprdeck]

but they have an APP that is nothing like the web site anyway.

[GBR1234]

What a mess.
Nothing links to where it should.
The "Rankings" dropdown to "Pairwise" once selected links to a news article from 2013.

[BearLover]

did the forums go away on that site too?

They're still there...on the top bar (which is above the other top bar)

[Beeeej]

What a mess.
Nothing links to where it should.
The "Rankings" dropdown to "Pairwise" once selected links to a news article from 2013.

I submitted a support ticket, and they just responded saying the site had been having major problems earlier but should be fine now.

[Trotsky]

What a mess.
Nothing links to where it should.
The "Rankings" dropdown to "Pairwise" once selected links to a news article from 2013.

I submitted a support ticket, and they just responded saying the site had been having major problems earlier but should be fine now.

Links seem to work now.

[upprdeck]

so they say the old forums exist..  but i cant find a real link anyplace.

[marty]

Here?