
Really cool college wrestling website - andegre
http://www.wrestlestat.com
======
andegre
Here's a really cool college wrestling website. Contains TONS of information
about teams and wrestlers. For teams, you can see rosters, depth charts,
schedules, eligibility breakdowns. For wrestlers you can all of their matches
results for their career. Site also offers it's own ranking system which
generates wrestler rankings, dual rankings, as well as tournament rankings.
The dual and tournament rankings are one-of-a-kind. Also offers two different
types of fantasy games, one a week-to-week challenge, and also a tournament
challenge similar to NCAA Basketball brackets. Can also personalize the
website to follow your favorite wrestlers and/or schools.

~~~
dalke
Minor comment, I think you should point out that you run the site.
Unfortunately there are a lot of hit-and-run self-promoters on HN, and they
tend to use a style similar to this. I usually flag them if I see them,
especially when the content has little to do with HN's readership.

Your comment history shows you are not one of those. I think if you had
written ".... wrestling website _I run_." you would improve the chance of
getting some feedback from other HNers, because it's a more personal
connection.

My market is completely different from yours. All I can offer is encouragement
in your effort.

As someone with no interest wrestling, I browsed around a bit out of
curiosity. Would it be reasonable to add more links? You have the Twitter
handles, but I have to copy/paste to get there, and there is no home page.
These could be linked, by icon, inside the the ws-header for the school page.

Will there be (possibly user-submitted) links to photos from recent meets?
What about links from the upcoming tournaments to the web site for the
tournament?

I don't think it's that important for most people to see "This is a cached
page, it was last updated: 9/16/2016 10:43:18 PM" / "View version: Click here
for live version | Cached version" right at the top of the content. Even if
they cared about cache status, I think "Last updated 5 seconds ago" would be
easier to interpret. Especially as it isn't 10:43:18 PM in this time zone.

I realize this is all extra work, and you are self-funded. Feel free to ignore
me!

Again, best of hopes that it goes well, and that you figure out a good funding
model.

~~~
andegre
Yes, it is my site. If this was the wrong medium, I can delete the post if I
have the ability (no idea as of writing this).

Regarding your feedback, THANK YOU! I like getting feedback from more
technical people.

Yeah, that date (format) is really annoying to look at now that you bring it
up. Makes much more sense to have it like you state (5 minutes ago...).

More links - I thought I had WAY too many links (been trying to figure out the
SEO stuff also). Just about anywhere in the site where you see either a
wrestlers name, or a school name, they are always links (except when they are
in headers). I can definitely add the links in the headers, the side-effect to
that is then they'll be underlined.

Cool idea on the photos and links to registration sites. Be fun way to
interact with each of the "events" and feel more like you were there.

Thanks again for the feedback, I'll definitely work on most/all of those!

~~~
dalke
HN is a bit negative for this sort of thing, _except_ as a "ShowHN", where
it's clear that the interest for HN readers is that it's from another HN
reader.

The question you should have, as a technical matter, is why your users should
care about the cache state. Do you need it at all?

You worry that there are too many links. The problem isn't that there are too
many links, but that they all look the same. The links I suggested could be
icons, rather than text.

On
[http://www.wrestlestats.com/compare/wrestler](http://www.wrestlestats.com/compare/wrestler)
I noticed that if the weight class is not given then the names are ordered
first by weigh class and second by name, so it isn't alphabetic. As a
usability suggestion, pulldown menus are harder to use than selection boxes.
There are only 10 weight classes, so you could arrange them as:

    
    
      [any] [125] [133] ...
    

so people can do one click to change the class. Similarly, with the names you
could have a multiple select box with rows="10" instead of a pulldown. You
might also consider a side-by-side layout, because you have so much horizontal
space. It would also help the balance of the page.

(BTW, the prediction code has an interesting failure mode. If you use the same
name for A and B then the scores always differ by 1. Shouldn't the scores be
tied?)

In general, I use what's called a user-centered design approach. (Bear in mind
that I'm a backend person, so I don't do this often - I'm not an expert.) Come
up with about 3-5 different types of personas who might use the site; fans,
players, family, coach, etc. It's a bit more specific than that, see Alan
Cooper's writings and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_\(user_experience\))
.

Pick the one persona you want to focus on, but keep the others in mind. Figure
out what sort of things they want, and optimize for it.

For example, you have a comparison tool. There are two ways to get to a
comparison, one from the tool I mentioned, another from the person's page,
under "Projected Upcoming Matches". To get to that from the second one, the
links are all "comparison".

If you want to optimize for that, then what about putting the prediction there
instead, like "18 - 3 TF", and link that to the comparison page? (Of course,
then it would be a prediction rather than a comparison, so the column header
might change.)

For another example, and going back to the Twitter example, figure out for
yourself the scenario where someone would use your app to find a team's
Twitter handle, then see if there are ways to make it easier to use.

My one big pointer is that you should be aware that there may be no revenue to
this. There used to be many ways to set up forum sites, and many small
organizations would could put together specialized newsletters, and make money
from specialized advertisement and membership fees. Facebook groups have
sucked up most of that.

~~~
andegre
More great points/constructive criticism! Thank you! I'll work on/think about
implementing that stuff.

