New AFL site (suggestions, complaints and compliments)

[TheWhiteRhino]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

I may not be a huge web person, but as a regular internet user, surely the most attractive and practical layout/design for the AFL website would be achieved by following these simple steps:

(1) Move the BigPond toolbar from the top of the page to the bottom.

(2) Extend the "AFL Toyota Premiership 2007" blue toolbar across the entire page.

(3) Flip the "2007 Toyota Premiership Season" caption/ wording with the team colours (i.e move teams to bottom of toolbar).

(4) Move "Fixtures and Results" block to the left of the page. Put ladder underneath it when it comes up.

(5) Move News Screen to centre of page

(6) Ditch all the pictures which accompany the other "Latest News' headlines. They take up too much space and look terrible, especially when the same pictures are used constantly.

(7) Move Audio and Video block to far right.

It's no big mystery that just about all sporting websites I have seen use this layout/design. And the reason why is simple, its the best.

Sandy, can you please why your team chose the current layout when clearly so many people find it utterly confusing, clustered and unhelpful.

 

[weevil]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

People really shouldn’t post when they have been drinking.

I fully agree the site is far from perfect, there is too much advertising, it is a little slow and some of the bugs need to be ironed out, But some of this ‘end of the world is nigh’ hyperbole is flat out embarrassing.

Some of you guys would find a reason to sook if Telstra gave you free beer.

 

[GoBackToVFL]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

you know nothing of the web industry fact.

are you suggesting that flash does not use more bandwidth then standard html/javascript? It should be avoided when standard html can achieve the same result. Only lazy developes use flash over standard design techniques.

people really shouldn’t post when they have been drinking.

i agree

 

[GoBackToVFL]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

...

http://www.rr.com/flash/


for anyone who thinks flash technology is slow this site should also sort that out.
....

i clicked that link and it is still loading.

i have had time to quote you, edit your post and type this.

still loading

there it is... about 35 seconds....a map of america with a list of states. great

would have taken 5 seconds with a few gifs and an image map or two

why is bigfooty so much faster than that site?

dont tell me flash is low bandwidth. the only thing fast about it is how quickly you can churn out chunky pages

 

[Smokin]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Sandy, in the player list view in gameday, the list shows 21 players, before you have to scroll down to see the rest.

For the season proper, you should alter the sizing slightly to enable all 22 players to be seen on the list without the annoying need to scroll.

 

[m0nty]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

That RR site is not so much about speed, but the prettiness of the end result. Once you choose your state you go through to the main page, and it looks fabulous. Anti-aliased fonts (especially Verdana) are far better on the eyes than pixelated text.

Of course, the other option is to do it like NFL/Sportsline and make the news and live scoring all AJAX so you can use those nice fonts with no problem.

 

[fishman]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

New website is toilet. Seriously bad. Resource hungry, doesnt work well on firefox (hey Bigpond - IE isnt the be and end all of the internet,) too much flash (seems flash for the sake of flash.) Fonts are too small too. Navigation is difficult also.

Also, believe it or not, some people who follow afl also have dialup - I have adsl at home but dial up at work - try loading it on dialup - AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!

Want a good format? - try cricinfo - straight forward without all the fluff. You can find what you want without needing a roadmap.

 

[amos]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

the AFL site is such ********. someone, please give me an audio link to the hawks game. AFL YOU SUCK.

 

[1.AW]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

How pathetic is the site, we can't even listen to the game.

 

[chickens_law]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

How pathetic is the site, we can't even listen to the game.

I agreee. The site is ******** up and ******ed.

 

[CattyBossDog]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Game Day Live Application
Most of you really like it but it still needs tweaking eg. Live radio needs to be more accessible, terminology needs to be rethought (eg. Pitch view)

I've got to say, as an interstate fan, I can not get access to the game tonight in any way, shape, or form. The game is not being broadcast on TV. It is not even being replayed at 3am (as normal last season), and now I cannot even get to it via internet radio.

The new site is as buggy as all hell. The internet radio coverage just does not work, and the site itself simply doesn't update properly.

At least I have BigFooty to give me the gist of what's going on in the game. AFL.com.au is just pathetic!



AFL.com.au


Booooooo!


Get your act together before the start of the season proper. This isn't good enough!

 

[Portia]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Note to AFL.com.au

If you are going to block 5aa from streaming their own coverage, then YOU SHOULD PROVIDE IT.

 

[amos]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Note to AFL.com.au

If you are going to block 5aa from streaming their own coverage, then YOU SHOULD PROVIDE IT.

Note to AFL.com.au

If you are going to block SEN from streaming their own coverage, then YOU SHOULD PROVIDE IT.

 

[QPR Boy]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Note to AFL.com.au

If you are going to block SEN from streaming their own coverage, then YOU SHOULD PROVIDE IT.

Note to AFL.com.au

If you are going to block K-ROCK/MMM from streaming their own coverage, then YOU SHOULD PROVIDE IT.


Ah well, at least i can rely on QPR's game at Ipswich this afternoon to be available on the net without any hassles!

 

[QPR Boy]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

AMAZING -

SEN stream is working perfectly again now that the game has just finished

Demetriou, pull some funds out of your lunch budget for your prawn sandwich mates, and spend it fixing up your disgrace of a website so the international supporters can listen to the game.

I still am a member of my club despite living 10,000 miles away, so why shouldn't we be looked after?

 

[Red Crow]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Uhh... what?

Sandy... a few cosmetic things I think need addressing.

Firstly, why isn't the Geelong logo/icon thingy in 3D like all the other clubs? And also, the Crows one seems to alternate between blue-yellow-red and red-yellow-blue.

Also, you have the nicknames of all teams except Fremantle. Everywhere it is "Adelaide Crows", "Carlton Blues"... but then its just "Fremantle". Does it have something to do with that shoe company that owns the brand name dockers or something? If so and u can't actually do it... I think all clubs should be changed to no nickname. As in the picture above, you can see that in the gameday thing it goes by nickname only. Therefore, at some stage it will be say something like "Blues v Fremantle" and just look stupid IMO.


EDIT:: Okay, so I just realised that Q5 and Q6 reffered to extra time, and was not a glitch in the system... well surely to avoid the problem it should be labelled ET1 and ET2?!

 

[Doctorb]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

I figured that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Yes - I could write a thousand words about what to do and why. But this is much, much easier.

 

[hirthy]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

The #1 thing i wish to see is HTML STATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[hirthy]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Text Commentary on the game similiar to Cricinfo.com style would be great too.

 

[dont bowl there]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Hahaha Doctorb that is great, what a terrible terrible site! After cricket.com.au it is easliy the worst official sports site i have seen. I could have done beter ffs.

 

[dont bowl there]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

The #1 thing i wish to see is HTML STATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That would be too easy mate, they love to show how "cool" they are by using super duper flash wicked animation gameday! Where it doesnt reload within 5 minutes of the actual game and it doesnt give good stats. AFL are a ****ing joke when it comes to looking after fans.

 

[PHX]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

One of the most useless things is having the flash news thingo with pics and the headline and then the EXACT same headline underneath it. Pick one or the other AFL.

THen you'll have more space for your ads as well.

 

[fishman]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Having worked at bigpond i can tell you all that no matter what they wont change it back - its not in their vocab to admit they were wrong.

Only thing i can advise is send letters to their complaints address (from memory)

Bigpond
Locked Bag 410
Pennant Hills
2120

 

[ThePope]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Hahaha Doctorb that is great, what a terrible terrible site! After cricket.com.au it is easliy the worst official sports site i have seen. I could have done beter ffs.

cricket.com.au gets slammed in comparison to cricinfo, but one thing they did amazingly well is live coverage this summer.

I spent all summer watching the ASHES LIVE on my laptop in full screen on a 2.4Mbps cable connection, with no buffering (after the initial buffer), very little to no compression artifacts, all up you couldn't pick the difference to a TV. It was amazingly good, and it cost a total of US$25 for the summer. That's right, $25 for 5 tests and 15 or so ODIs. I know they only have 1 game at a time, you have 8 each week, but they still did it for 6 hours a day, 5 days straight.

So Sandy, I really don't care about the design, or the colours, or the order of the names... just fix up the video quality. I want to be able to pick up which player is which. I want to be able to see the ball moving. I don't want to have to wait for the close-up to see who has the ball.

Ring up Cricket Australia or Ch 9 or 3 Mobile and find out how they did it, and stop blaming the "pipe" and distance. They did it live - you have the luxury of 24 hour delay to improve the compression algorithms.

Get rid of the "automatic" quality setting and allow users to select a quality, and please please please allow the streams to be downloaded so that you can see a full screen high quality image. Dancing postage stamp quality videos don't belong on a professional sport site in 2007. Put some (dare I say it) DRM or similar into it to stop it from being shared around... but if you don't allow full quality streams, then we'll all start looking for the illegal copies anyway.

 

[PHX]

Re: BetaSite of AFL.com.au

Oh yeah for us without High-speed broadband its always good that the video will be allowed to buffer a fair bit, when I try to watch it the video doesnt flow and all I get is a still picture updating every 5 seconds and audio even if I do pause to try to let it catch up.

EDIT: AND I was a computer with 56K capabilities and it took 105 seconds to load WITHOUT even the flash content being shown because macromedia was out of date, I'd hate to think with the Flash elements how long it would've taken. And you wonder why 82% of visitors are on broadband.