Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Wake n’ Bacon
No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon
via Crave
Thursday, February 08, 2007
ESPN Gets a Mini-Facelift
ESPN.com has restyled the top portion of the home page. I figured I’d give my initial (disclaimer: late-night) thoughts.
There’s a new double menu, with some 2.0-y offerings on top, and the standard leagues/sports menu on the bottom.
The area up top: logo, ad, search box, tv schedule have also been redone.
The gradient behind the top looks more subtle (even if it’s not, this is just my impression of it), and both menus are text on flat colors.
The old-style menus, which you can still see on the inner-pages, had the leagues/sports on a gradient and the submenus on a flat color with a bevel/border highlight on rollover.
The new yellow background for the submenus is a drastic change, but easy to read and the rollover has a nicer look than before.
The top is nice and neat. I have to admit I laughed a bit when I’m shown these are the “hottest searches”: Bracketology | Sports Guy | NFL Draft | TMQ | NBA rankings | NHL rankings
An interesting thing to note is the change in order for the leagues/sports.
Old: NFL, MLB, NBA, NASCAR, Autos, NHL, College, Golf, Soccer, Tennis
New: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, ESPNU, College FB, Men’s BB, Women’s BB, NASCAR, Autos, Golf, Soccer, Tennis, Boxing, Olympics
Fantasy has made a shift from far-right to far-left, in between ESPN (home) and NFL.
Consideration: the new menu stretches across the home page, designed for a 1024x768 resolution. The old menu, that I’m comparing from the inner pages, is designed for 800x600 resolution. The inner pages do have more conent to the right of it, but the menu is cut off there, so there is room for more menu choices on this new homepage design.
Some sports sites do change menu order depending on season, but the positioning is curious as the NHL is given better position than before and NASCAR, maing its return to ESPN, is pushed towards the right. Most menus are generally left to right in order of importance (at least for English pages). Sometimes important items are broken up, to give the items in between a better chance of being seen, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what ESPN is trying to do here or the NFL and MLB would be the goalposts of this menu.
ESPNU is the only ESPN brand that gets a prime menu position (most are under the home submenu). February is probably the best time for them to push the brand with fans anticipating March Madness. Yesterday was “Signing Day” for college football, something I didn’t know before. The lines between pro and college continue to blur.
Back to the new double menu, with the 2.0-y offerings. It starts off with MyESPN, something I’ve heard little of since the first release. Is anyone using this out there? The only plus for me right now would be to not have ESPN Motion autoplay.
Insider, the ESPN.com offerings behind a paywall is the second option.
ESPN 360 wants to launch a video player. It does. Out of curiousity, I hit “Video” and I get the same player, and it starts the same content. I realize ESPN wants people to bug their ISPs to sign deals for 360 content (as that’s how you get access to it), but I’m not sure if it’s really worth two menu options that lead to the same place.
Page 2 and SportsNation have become ESPN.com standards, and then after that is Blogs. But, they’re all “Insider Blogs”. You need to subscribe to Insider to read any of them. I’m guessing that’s making ESPN some nice coin, because they’re certainly not popular to link to on any of the blogs I read, large or small. I know revenue, not traffic, is the name of the game for ESPN, but I still wonder what the numbers would be if ESPN’s top reporters would have open blogs.
Podcenter is just what you’d think it would be.
After that is Video Games, a partnership between ESPN and 1UP. There’s a good amount of reviews, but not a lot of fresh content. It seems like it’s there as more of a promotional area, which is a good lead-in for the last few options: Travel, Contests, Shop.
The last link is actually to ESPN Deportes, which I haven’t visited in quite a while. It has a look very similar to the one ESPN.com had before this slight makeover.
The change does strike me as a “clean up”, and I think it works well. I hope ESPN takes this approach soon with all their pages.