By Jessica N. Bowles-Martinez
At first I was annoyed by the pop up windows and as a reflex I went
to close them. Then I decided to take a look at what the window was.
Apparently they have a game set up where you are randomly given three
cards which have athletes from all ranges of sports listed, and depending
on how those athletes perform that day you get points. You only get
points if you visit the day the athletes play and have their cards,
so its an incentive to visit the site. It was sort of neat because
it created more interest in sports or events the normal viewer wouldn't
normally look at, but because points are involved they will pay more
attention and have an vested interest. This could break the online
routine of a viewer who normally just goes to straight to the NBA
section to look at golf or football information.
The page layout is not very original, and it looks a lot like the
CNN site or other news sites, with one main picture surrounded by
text in an L shape, a menu on the left, and scores on the far right.
What I especially don't like about the layout is that there is a search
area is at the top of the page taking up a lot of space and pushing
the whole page down, so it had a very bulky busy feel, and you often
need to scroll down a bit to take in any of the content.most of the
sections stick to the same general layout but with variations in the
graphics, the woman's basketball page had so much banners and search
junk at the top that only the bottom half of the screen had any information,
and was annoying if i wanted to glance over without scrolling.
The part of the page that broke from the layout and did something
original, with an overall sense of style, rather than a formulaic
layout was the extreme sports section. It was much cleaner, the bright
color blocks and the diagonal angles were eye catching, but not sloppy
looking, giving it more a sense of life and movement. The content
also tended to be more interesting with things like sequence shots
of snow boarders being shown. There was no big picture to pull you
in, or bring the action at once in a picture, but the smaller images
were interesting and not hard to notice or see. This part seemed like
it was a totally different site as the graphics, layout, focus toward
sports culture were all in totally different styles. When banner adds
are at the top, they don't push the entire page down, but fit into
the graphics so it doesn't look awkward and like it was just attached
at the last moment. The ads that were up also followed the themes
of the page, using similar style graphics, and showing people engaged
in extreme sports (mostly skiing). I'm not a sports fan, but I found
this part of the site interesting, while I found the rest of it very
boring, and formulaic in its presentation. The reason that I think
the site can get away with being so boring looking on the more mainstream
sports page is because they are not trying to appeal to a new audience,
but instead are acting a supplement to the regular ESPN viewer, so
rather than draw them in with eye catching graphics, they want a page
that delivers content that is frequently updated without a lot of
attention being paid to style. The demographic is likely older sports
fans who are used to reading the paper for their sports news in the
past, and as a result don't want or expect anything that deviates
from this layout.
The reason that the "extreme sports" part of the site is
probably done in a more eye catching fashion is that they are trying
to get a totally different demographic. They want to get the attention
of a younger group of sports fans that has been on the internet for
a while and have certain standards and expectations. It also focuses
more on the lifestyle around the sport which implies that those reading
about the sports are also participating in them. Since these groups
are so different its not surprising that this page is so different.
The biggest disappointment of this part of the site is that the interviews
seemed to be a bit superficial in their nature, perhaps the people
making this site were not familiar with what they were reporting on,
and this layout and presentation was the end result of an analysis
of what "young people in sports go for", in a page layout
and general content, and failed with a few of the specifics. Or, perhaps,
I'm too cynical.