New AFL site (suggestions, complaints and compliments)

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Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

I am curious why Sandy didn't consider consulting here BEFORE they spent a zillion dollars on a site.

Its pretty fast, so thats a good thing.

I assume ladder and match info will be loaded once the season begins?
Lose the monster Foxtel ad (or at least move it)...fair dinkum this make you look like idiots.

I see this generally as an ugly relationship ..bigpond-afl..
Wonder how the tendering process for the site was managed? I suspect a long boozy lunch.
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

My suggestion would be to just get the simple things right and keep it up to date. Surely Round 2 of the NAB cup fixture is known by now, but according to afl.com.au:

Friday March 2
TBA V TBA
Saturday March 3
TBA V TBA
TBA V TBA
Sunday March 4
TBA V TBA
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Absolutly hate it.
Its to busy and very user unfriendly.
The best sites are the ones that KEEP IT SIMPLE.
I also like the old stats and score sheets. There is to much needless information in this one. the score line on the left hand side (the one with one teams score on one side and the other teams score on the other) is usless and annoying along with the score by score undate.
Also the ads should be on the external of the page.
 

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Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

GoDons said:
Can't say I like the format of the stats in Game Day live. I would much prefer to see Kicks, Handballs then Marks. It's just easier to read as thats the way it always has been.
Click to expand...

Mate your spot on!!!

Kicks, Handballs, Marks and then Disposals.

Plus why would you list the players alphabetically by first name??

Also why not make the GameDay live window bigger so we don't have to scroll down to see the other players.

I have 24" LCD monitor. Because of the aligment of the site I have more then half of my screen is blank. Why not have the alignment set to centre, like most modern sites?? I know my LCD is big, but it even looks like that on my 19" LCD.

I got 2 more points.

Why does it take so long for the content of the site to be updated?? Nearly ever weekend last night, it to hours and hours for the ladder to be updated. For example the Doggies won a game on a Saturday night. On the Sunday afternoon they ladder was still the same. Why is this??

Also I think the site is to busy. All the content seems really squashed together. It seems like the site was designed for someone that has a 15" monitor. Most people have large screens now so I reckon the site needs to be changed for that reason.

I really hope you respond to this post.

Cheers!

Oh one more thing. The GameDay live, why not have the DreamTeam totals?? I'm sure most of us here enter the AFL DreamTeam, and you general you have to wait until Monday morning before you know how many points your players have got you. Why not have the DreamTeam totals on the GameDay live.
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Here are some comments I think are appropriate.

Without a doubt load times are too high and there is excessive use of Flash.

More thought should be made about grouping. For example:

Awards should be changed too Awards and Stats with a drop down leading to 2007 AFL Stats. It is the obvious grouping choice.

Tickets heading should be grouped with Membership with an option for membership sales as well as an advertisment/link on the ticket page. It is the obvious up sell to buying a ticket and should be presented as an option.

Mobiles heading is unclear. It seems like you are trying to sell mobiles rather than alerts etc.


Left Alignment is rediculous.
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

IMHO the site basically looks like a uni student trying to impress his teacher, actually maybe a high school student. Flash left, right and center with absolutely no need for the majority of it.

For example the main flash part, 4 out of the 5 stories shown (and taking up 1/4 of the screen) are available to be clicked just underneath it on the AFL news section. What is the purpose of this?

The layout of the site is woeful. Audio and Video should be where the fixtures and results section is. I'm struggling to imagine where the ladder is going to be placed when it goes up.

Too much "BigPond". The site looks like a Bigpond site about AFL, not an AFL site. There are 4 ads for Bigpond when I open the page and don't scroll down. The huge one up top, one for BigpondTV on the right, Bigpond music under the Audio and Video and another music one under the fixtures. That is WAY too much.

Has BigPondTV been fixed so that it allows people without that terrible web browser Internet Explorer to use it?

Also DanA's point about grouping is important and should be looked at.
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Hey everyone,

I apologise for the delay in responding.

Last night I did a loser thing and that is I wrote a consolidated reply to most of the topics so far. It took me about an hour to write it.

But I damn well forgot about webform/timeouts and when I hit submit, lost the lot! I went to bed with the s**ts.

I'm about to post a lengthy reponse, so stand by ...

:)
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Garantee you are going to cop flack from NAB. No image of NAB when you sign up to footy tipping page and that gregarious Music TV add below their advertisement which stands out like dogs balls.
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

I've noticed a few minor changes on the site already. It's good to see you're getting feedback from the public and making the changes. :thumbsu:
 

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Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Hi All,

I’ve had a read through all the comments so far and rather than respond to each individually, I thought I’d put forward one response. This will belong, so sit back and relax.

Firstly … and I reckon I’ll say this numerous times … ;) … AFL.com is a beta site. It’s definitely got problems. We purposely launched a beta so we could get your feedback. Not survey based feedback but “real time” feedback based on “real time” usage. Whilst usability testing is all well and good, and important, real time usage and feedback is way better.

Most of the feedback has been fantastic and is now being included in the AFL.com Program of Work (the work between now and March 30 and then another phase post March 30).

Scores
There’s a bug in the stored procedure driving the results. Definitely not good, we acknowledge that. It’s being fixed now and the fix will be in place tonight.

Download Time
We’ve done significant Stress and Volume Testing and the site is loading, on average, in 8-10 seconds. The homepage weight however, is 650k, and we’ll continue tweaking and optimising the code to get the page size down. That I imagine, will also include means some rework on the Flash app driving GameDayLive.

Stats
Some of you have asked about historical stats. All historical stats have been migrated across from the old site but are currently hidden as they are being restyled. They’ll be available in the next week or so.

Stats – HTML version of GameDayLive
Quite a few of you have suggested this so I’ve added it to the Program of Work and will be prioritised later this week. I can’t say whether it’s possible to do but can confirm we’ve added it in and it’s a great suggestion.

Ladder
Someone asked about the ladder. It’s not there because there is no ladder for NAB Cup.

Streaming from Overseas
Ash78 described some problems he’s experiencing streaming from overseas. Video content like match replays are multi-bit encoded between 180k and 600k. The system should deliver the most applicable encode rate based on “your bandwidth available at the time”. Unfortunately the pipes from Europe into Australia are not under our control nor is the “state of the internet” at any moment in time so bandwidth and streaming together, can be problematic.

Streaming from Australia will always be a problem for people overseas. To alleviate this, we have contemplated a “download” product for sport video but this is not in the AFL Program of Work, it’s contained in the BigPond Sport Program of Work.

One caveat: there has been a bug in the video XML widget that is being fixed. This bug has caused old content to display, duplicate content to appear and the widget on the homepage is not operating as efficiently as it should.

Non BigPond Customer Access
Nicksavo asked about whether non BigPond customers can get access to video and there has been some comment around why are we hiding the video.

BigPond buys content like the exclusive New Media Rights to AFL in order to acquire and retain customers. This is an identical business model to that of PayTV. However, in 2007, we have opened up more video than ever before. Content that remains exclusive to BigPond customers and international subscribers is:
  • Match replays (Good news is the enforced holdback is now only 12 hours not 24 hours)
  • Club content
  • Create your own highlights
  • Live events (eg. U/18’s, Draft)
What is open to all Australian broadband users in 2007 is:
  • Match highlights (every game)
  • GamesDay NewsDesk (¼ by ¼ highlights)
  • PanelShows (all preview and review shows)
  • Marks of the Round
  • Goals of the Round
Layout
Mr Q and others have made numerous comments about layout and design. Layout is one thing, design is another. Layout is slightly easier to be objective about than design. We appreciate all your feedback on design and currently the views, as I said yesterday, are split about 50/50 (loving it vs hating it).

On the layout front, yep agree, there’s a lot going on and we’ll be tweaking the site for the rest of the year. We’ve got usage reporting in place so we can watch “in real time”, the usage of particular elements of the site. I can’t give a concrete answer here but can acknowledge that this thing will change and evolve, for the better.

Advertisements
CrowGirl and quite a few others have commented about the amount and layout of advertising.

As most of you know, the core way for portals to return some investment is through paid advertising. This is the prevalent business model on the Internet today. On the homepage of AFL.com, there is only one paid online position (above the 1024 fold) and a leaderboard advert at the bottom of the page. On sub pages however, I acknowledge the leaderboard advertisement is pretty unattractive (argh) and I’ve asked the team to rethink its layout.

Round 1 NAB Cup Weekend
Here’s an interesting story … the bulk of the problems on the weekend were a domino affect caused by our brand new load balancers crashing. When the load balancers freaked out and went down, a number of things then happened that then corrupt a number of the XML feeds for the scores, dashboard, news, etc. A patch was installed on the load balancers last night and Stress and Volume Testing is being conducted with our external hosting company between now and Friday’s first game.

Browser Compatibility
Funkalicious described experiencing problems with either Safari of Firefox/Mozilla. Safari browsers account for .5% of the AFL.com user base and Mozilla accounts for 2.4% of users.

When the site and CSS have been built, they’ve been looked at in both IE and Mozilla. Mozilla should not be presenting problems so for any of you that have identified errors with Mozilla, we’re really really keen to see screen dumps or examples. You can mail me privately here at BigFooty.

GameDayLive
GameDayLive has been migrated from the old system and obviously needs work. We wanted to get it out there in real time and get some real feedback and man, have we received useful, and at times, really obvious feedback ;) There’s a separate Program of Work for GameDayLive so expect a bunch of changes and tweaks over the next few weeks, many of them from your feedback.

Improvements
94eagles suggested I describe some of the improvements to AFL.com for you all to think about. The thing to note about the rebuild of AFL.com is that there have been significant changes and improvements to a large number of systems that are “not” fan facing, so I don’t really expect commentary on these topics. Let me describe them for you.

Hardware
The entire hardware environment has been decommissioned. Everything we could find: webservers, dbase servers, caches, proxies, load balancers. We trashed the lot. We have re-architected a new environment running what we call an active / active composition. This means we have two live sites running in parallel, geographically separate from each other. Should one go down, the other takes over, in real time. We have also architected and Stress and Volume Tested well well beyond the maximum number of concurrent users experienced on AFL.com last year.

Dbase
The old dbase, frankly, was a joke. So we trashed it and have migrated 50,000+ articles, 30,000+ photes, 18,000+ video and audio files across to SQL2005. We have importantly, created proper relationships between the files.

My developer Pete wants me to share this with the more technical of you:
<commence geek speak>The linkages between articles on the old site were made at the time each article was originally entered (query parameters to each screen). This was hardly relational and ignored fundamental linkages between sport tables. In migrating to the new system we had to create a structure from the existing linkages and this meant parsing lots of textual information using a heuristic/"on the fly" technique which was error prone and involved LOTS of question asking at the end of the process. However we now have a relational system (almost too relational actually) with much more time spent than was scheduled essentially, parsing text columns instead of Primary/Foreign key relationships. </commence geek speak>

I would like to acknowledge that the complexity of this migration was through no fault of the previous developers. They also had to deal with a cumbersome and archaic system.

Content Management System
The content management system has also been decommissioned and replaced with dotnetnuke, an open source framework (www.dotnetnuke.com). This framework is much more modular, efficient and uses more modern toolsets in the framework. It also allows much easier content management by anyone adding content to either AFL.com or any of the Club sites.

WebServices
Standard WebServices has been used for mobile integration across SMS, WAP1.0, WAP2.0 and 3G.

SSIS
We use SSIS for all feeds...a new feature in sql2005.

Ajax
Someone asked about using HTML and Ajax. The bulk of this site has been built using Ajax: fixtures, player profiles, statistics, coaches, match reports and match previews for example.

Editorial and Content
Two new companies have been engaged to provide all content and editorial for AFL.com and the Clubs. What you will see this year is an increase in “exclusive” content that will not appear anywhere else except for AFL.com or the Clubs. You’ll also an increase in quantity.

A component will be automated XML feeds from AAP with the rest made up of exclusive editorial, commentary and content generation.

We’ve introduced new companies, new production processes and new content to the AFL.com mix.

Windows Media Centre/Viiv
For those of you with one of these two new entertainment devices, match replays, highlights, panel shows and audio can be watched from WMC or Viiv.

Photo Gallery
The AFL has a new official supplier of photos, AFL Publishing so the old system, processes and production approach has been replaced with a new one.


If you’ve got this far, well done, and thank you for listening! I have captured here only a small part of what’s going on in the rebuild of AFL.com but hopefully a bit to give you an idea of the size and complexity.

Keep the suggestions coming and we’ll make every attempt to log and learn from them.

Best,
Sandy
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Sandy, that's a very comprehensive repsonse and i know i appreciated seeing the issues from your point of view. It sounds as though the current cosmetic or design issues will be addressed according to feedback and will, as you put it, evolve over time.

I feel that you'd go a long way to making this little black duck happy by addressing the amount and type of content available. It seems that the American sport administrators tend to do this pretty well. If you check sites like ESPN.go.com, PGATour.com and NFL.com they tend to have a lot of extra editorial content that surrounds the bare bones of fixtures, results and standard 'AFL News' updates. It would be good to see some more ojective and expert opinion on all sides of the sport. I think the ESPN video streaming platform is called "ESPN 360 - The Game, and everything around it". Borrowing from this philosophy would make the site much better for me.

However I do have a question I bet you can't answer. Why do you barrack for North Melbourne?

;-)
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Sandy thanks for your reply. Your points are very encouraging.

One thing you didn't mention was having the DreamTeam points accumulate on GameDayLive. And also changing the order of the stats on GameDayLive. Having marks, handballs and then kicks is just silly. I have never ever seen AFL stats in this order. Plus you really have to add possessions. Possessions / Disposals / Touches are how most AFL fans determine how a player has gone in a game. I have forgotten how many times I've asked a follow AFL fan "How many touches did <player> get on the week-end?"

I just think have the possessions on GameDayLive is a BIG must.
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Alphanumeric said:
Sandy thanks for your reply. Your points are very encouraging.

One thing you didn't mention was having the DreamTeam points accumulate on GameDayLive. And also changing the order of the stats on GameDayLive. Having marks, handballs and then kicks is just silly. I have never ever seen AFL stats in this order. Plus you really have to add possessions. Possessions / Disposals / Touches are how most AFL fans determine how a player has gone in a game. I have forgotten how many times I've asked a follow AFL fan "How many touches did <player> get on the week-end?"

I just think have the possessions on GameDayLive is a BIG must.
Click to expand...

All points here need to be addressed. I agree 100%
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

CaptainPorks, AlphaNumeric and HardBallGet,

Apologies gentlemen, I left a few comments out of my previous monologue!

Amount of Content and Editorial
Media Giants are the new Team in place, in collaboration with AAP, to deliver news and content to AFL.com. In my previous post I mentioned we'll do doing more "exclusive" content for both AFL.com and the Clubs in addition to the standard stuff you'd expect to see. There will be more as well.

Watch and read the new content over the next few weeks and make some comments then. Us and Media Giants would be keen to hear your thoughts on content/editorial.

DreamTeam in GameDayLive
Loved the suggestion, have passed it onto the team that manage the Program of Work for GameDayLive and it'll be discussed amongst that team. Can't add much more at this stage.:thumbsu:

Same appiles to Possessions and the alph listing of players names.

Overuse of Flash
There's more Ajax on ths site than Flash though I take your point (cause many others have said it too) an I'll log it for discussin with the team. Can't give much more on this at this stage but feel confident we'll be talking about it.

Best,
Sandy

I'd better go and do some work ...


 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

sldavey said:
Overuse of Flash
There's more Ajax on ths site than Flash though I take your point (cause many others have said it too) an I'll log it for discussin with the team. Can't give much more on this at this stage but feel confident we'll be talking about it.

Best,
Sandy

I'd better go and do some work ...
Click to expand...

Most people don't know the difference between Flash and Ajax so will just state it as Flash.
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

CaptainPorts,

If I said I remember Ron Barassi when he was coaching North Melbourne ...


 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

sldavey said:



Non BigPond Customer Access

What is open to all Australian broadband users in 2007 is:
Match highlights (every game)
Click to expand...


I just tried to access the Melbourne vs Hawthorn highlights and was told that I had to logon to Bigpond
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

sldavey said:
CaptainPorts,

If I said I remember Ron Barassi when he was coaching North Melbourne ...


Click to expand...

I'd feel sorry for you and understand your pain.

Come to think of it, if you work on AFL.com.au at Bigpond and you've barracked for North since Barassi, you must have become a glutton for punishment later in life.


;)
 
Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Only request I have is to simply back up the call for HTML stats.
They are simple and give us who are after them what we need - hopefully these are able to be put in place.
 
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