The Sweeper: New MLS Website Disappoints
Big Story
Let’s say this first: as far as English-language football league websites go, MLS already had the best, as cluttered and ugly as it was in parts. There’s really never any reason to visit the English Premier League’s site, for example, whereas MLS’ site at least has long had plenty of content, video and information.
It was just buried in a design that suggested someone got way too excited when they discovered the hyperlink HTML tag.
A new site was needed, and MLS have clearly made a considerable commitment to beef up the content in a cleaner design. All good intentions from the league’s perspective.
And today, their new site, MLSSoccer.com, launched.
In lieu of a full review to come later, here are a few first reactions. I understand that a new site has rough edges, but overall, I’m fairly disappointed. Quick thoughts:
- The design is cleaner; fewer links, larger headings. Unfortunately, it’s grey. Really grey. Why not incorporate more of the colours of the logo into the design?
- The news section has good, clear formatting in the main column, but the sidebar bullets don’t even align correctly with the links.
- This points to an obvious fact: this site is not finished. I realise the first game is tonight, but a standings page that doesn’t even list the teams in MLS does not look good.
- The “supporters” page has a prominent link, which is nice, but the actual content is abysmal. It links to two poorly-formatted listings of bars and supposed “stadium guides”, which is in fact a badly presented list of links to existing information elsewhere. There is nothing about supporters’ groups; how about some links to each team’s recognised groups? How about some creative, fun information about being an MLS supporter? Some photos? Some video? A visitor who clicked on supporters to find out about fans in MLS would learn absolutely nothing from this section.
- The stats page is a good overview of things from on the field numbers leaders to attendance figures, though again, the table formatting is sloppy, and the information is hardly comprehensive.
- The schedule page is sadly not sortable by team, but just a complete list of every game. An option to sort and view nationally televised games would also be useful.
- The clubs page is just a list of links, with the actual link to each club’s site a curiously small button. How about some general information on each club from a league-wide perspective? A listing of trophies won, for example?
- Apparently, the Chicago Fire have no players. Crap!
- The video page looks good. Unfortunately, I can’t play any of the videos from Firefox on Windows; attempting to auto-find the plugin needed fails. Maybe it works in IE?
- The Photos page is simply bizarre. The most prominent link is to “Hot Players” — seriously?? It appears to mean “hot” as in Adriana Lima hot, and features 12 photos of players with their shirts off. I’m sure Kickette will like it, but your average MLS fan? Huh?
- I can’t even find a link to the MLS Insider blog anymore, when one would think it would be featured on the homepage. The front page of the site’s largest sub-section is curiously about Americans Abroad, rather than about MLS.
- The mobile site isn’t done yet.
You know what I think? Development on the site fell seriously behind schedule, and at some point the decision was made to simply launch it in time for the season opening tonight regardless of the quality of the production. Big mistake. Frankly, it’s amateurish in quality, with incomplete information, poor formatting, and at-times bizarre content.
MLS 3.0, hope to see you soon.
Quick Hits
- Michel Platini is seeking re-election as UEFA boss.
- The Football Association should not run the England team, says silly old Dave Whelan of Wigan.
- FC United of Manchester move ahead with their new stadium plans.
The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.
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FYI – The videos work fine for me in Firefox.
Other than that, spot on. The site is horribly incomplete and unpolished.
Perhaps they were hoping there would be a fire drill and they’d get an extra day.
I miss the links to the team pages from the MLS home page as well. I do like the links to all of the Twitter and Facebook pages for the teams, though.
Hey, at least they’ve already changed things. When it first came out this morning, one article said: “more than 1,000 traveling Philly fans will be in attendance on Thursday.”
They’ve since deleted that completely illogical comment.
Man, I don’t want to be too harsh, but some of the technical issues are just stunning.
My preferred browser is Chrome, and I get a couple of broken images on the home page — hah, wait. Okay, I refreshed the page to check whether it was 2 or 3 broken images, and the web page just changed on me, from oldish version to the new gray whale.
So, looking again at the home page…looks nice to me, no more broken images. On the video page, however, I get nothing when clicking to play the main video. I scroll down to the All | Highlights | Goals section, those videos *do* work for me. (Although the Highlights and Goals looks a bit odd being empty, but that’ll be remedied once the season gets underway, and I think visitors are smart enough to figure that out.)
Unfortunately I can’t test the video in IE8, because I’m still getting the oldish website, no matter how many times I refresh. What I was gonna say about Chrome earlier is that I realize it has a small marketshare, so I’m not one of those “How dare you don’t debug for MY browser!” nazis. However, the updated System Requirements page says that Firefox 1.5 and up should work for you. (http://www.mlssoccer.com/system-requirements). What I had gotten before and had made the “stunning” comment about is that the site requirements were aimed at IE6 and freaking Netscape 7.1, which I think are both from around 2001-2003 or so…
Anyway, I’m more optimistic now, I’m just curious about when everybody gets to see the new site. That 12 hot players thing is pretty bad, though.
LOL @ Danny Allsop being “hot.”
Well, they still have one more day to get matchcenter back online. Come on flash video, COME ON. The WMV stream was shit!
It also looks as though the MLS fantasy game has been sacrificed to the gods of web presence expediency. I’ve enjoyed that game for the last few years, and always imagined it was a good way to drive traffic to the site (and also to get people interested in otherwise meaningless games–I had no reason to care about KC v NE unless Sharlie was my captain for the week, earning me double points). The fantasy game standings on the site had indicated something like 20,000 teams entered–which almost certainly included lots of multiples, and lots of people who created fantasy team once and never returned. But still, I’d guess the game drove at least a few thousand people like me to site much more often than I might have otherwise done. So I’d be curious to know the logic on dropping that?
I am shocked that they had 18 months for a site and it is not ready. I was very surprised that it did not launch in January but assumed the delay was purposeful, but they clearly had nothing done at that point. Tom, how long did it take you to put the S8 site together BTW? You would think a group of professionals could get a great site done in a couple of months at the most.
You are being much too kind. It looks horrible. Can’t find anything. And the “news” seems to have gone from “rah rah” pablum to pointless cheek. I guess that’s supposed to make it “edgy.”
LOL @ Danny Allsop being “hot.”
I prefer Sofie Allsopp myself.
Let me know if anybody finds a boxscore anywhere on the new MLS site.
The most troubling thing I have with the site is that MLS never did a beta…not having the scores updated from yesterday is just pathetic.
(also, from an advertising perspective, they’ve limited themselves tremendously)
understandable on the bugs and so on. But the one thing I care about, is get the Video stuff going. I can’t find it now, so I can’t see the missed games that I get for free for 2 weeks. No wonder is free, you can’t see it!