

Ask HN: Are Sports Sites Outdated or Am I Not the Audience? - alanthonyc

Major sites like espn.com and foxsports.com are ugly and too busy for me.  Minor sites I've come across are similar.<p>What's the reason for this?  Is it just me?  Does the nature of their content force them to present information this way?  Are there other knowledge areas with similar requirements to which I can compare them?
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russell
I have to believe it's you (and me:-). Most people are attracted to images
more than texts. espn.com is rich in images and the text is low density.
Otherwise it is reasonably clean and not too garish. I suspect that a lot of
money went into the design and testing. US Today took the same approach to
image rich design when it came out. It was criticized for looking more like a
tabloid than a newspaper, but it quickly jumped to number 2 or 3.

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alanthonyc
It's true that compared to sports illustrated, espn is relatively text-sparse.
But it's there, and in sufficient quantities.

But it's not just the fact that the front page is image rich. It's that it's
image crowded. Is this really the best way to present this info?

Now that I think about it, when I compare espn to other news-centric sites
(albeit in other fields) like politico.com and cnn.com, there are a lot of
similarities.

So maybe it's not necessarily just a sports related issue.

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russell
Maybe the idea is to put as much of the high traffic links as possible on the
page without scrolling, like newspapers put the important stories above the
fold.

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mahmud
Who visits sports websites?

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joeycfan
They drop the coin on state-of-the-art sites - the SOTA is a bit dumb right
now, thats all.

