

Ask HN:  How can we improve our website? - weston

Hi, my name is Weston and we&#x27;ve built a sports news site called http:&#x2F;&#x2F;swarmsports.com.  We&#x27;re looking for feedback from the HN community in how we can grow our startup to make it successful.<p>We&#x27;re showing users the most viral sports news articles every day.<p>Even if you&#x27;re not a sports fan, any feedback is appreciated.<p>Thanks!
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LarryMade2
Flipping throough it...

From using chrome on the desktop it seems like the nav part is responsive but
the list isn't (the columns don't shrink accordingly nor the fonts reduce.)

I'd code it so on page 1/landing page you have the text "Viral Sports
Articles" on a line below nav and remove that bit from the nav bar, on
subsequent pages it doesn't need to be there. Loose the text on the logo if it
doesn't have to be there so you can make the logo bigger at such a small
scale.

Viral rank doesn't make much sense to me (thinking as Joe Sixpack here)...
numbers don't have much meaning maybe a call it "buzz rank" or something and
use color bar graphic, long and green for top, and the varying length/color
according to whatever the rank metric is.

So description is your categories... Maybe logo/sport symbols to have a quick
id?

Seems a little stuffy - all two colors... oh... bee colors... would have
noticed that if the logo was bigger.

Maybe a bit more sporty? One of the funnest pictures I've ever saw for a team
of programmers was for pro-line software
[http://www.pcmuseum.ca/icons/ProLineteam.jpg](http://www.pcmuseum.ca/icons/ProLineteam.jpg)
though it wasn't sports software, it was definitely a memorable picture. Kick
up your about with "the SwarmSports Team" along with some sports analogies
might add to the retention factor.

The blog header is really really nice compared - smiled when I saw it - Id
replicate it on the about and possibly on the first page of results. same with
the social icons. Blog has no back to content menu...

Space is expensive on phones shorten the date to mm/dd or mm/dd/yy or
something like "last Wed." then mm/dd after one week before...

I can't comment on how good the quality of CSS is and stuff, I'm still getting
a hang of it myself. My project has some similarities to what you are doing -
might check it out to give you some ideas:
[http://www.doplaces.com](http://www.doplaces.com)

Hope that helps.

~~~
weston
Very, very helpful! Thank you very much!

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spangborn
Hire a designer - the UI and UX could use some work. Here's some of the design
feedback I'd give you:

\- You're not utilizing the whole width of the page, and the table looks
pretty compressed, making it difficult to read.

\- You're also not using the whole height of the page. The pagination would be
more useful if there was more content. It's silly to waste that much real
estate.

\- The icons in the top right are too small and the third (mailing list)
carries no meaning.

\- Your logo in the navbar is too small, or at least the text. You probably
don't need the text in the logo if you've got the heading there.

\- Search is in a pretty unintuitive location - try putting it in the top
right of the layout.

Edit: From a functional perspective, you've got duplicated stories on the home
page currently. Same exact link, two different titles.

~~~
weston
Wow, thank you! This is very good feedback. :-)

I agree with everything you've said so far. Also, every once and a while a
dupe article slips through (ex: same URL, different title like you saw). We do
our best to keep an eye out in case something slips through our dupe-
detectors.

Thanks again!

~~~
simantel
I'd just like to add that you should probably include some images in your
site. It'd certainly spruce things up a bit. Check out the new Digg
([http://digg.com/](http://digg.com/)) for an example of a super slick news
aggregator site that's very image-heavy.

~~~
weston
We're currently doing some testing using images. We're still very early in our
product development.

The new Digg does look great and very slick!

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meerita
My suggestions:

Using bootstrap or another UI Framework would surely improve many things, from
the UX/UI side. At least it will help until a pro UX can work on it a lot
more.

Bootstrapping also will make you code better since the foundation of the code
is well done. It also works on mobile and it's easy to catch up as well to
tell other developers to manage our codebase, bootstrap has good documentation
online and you can do, practically, almost all kind of UI compositions with
JS.

After that, I would follow Google Pagespeed recomendations to reach the 100
points and have something like my blog wich loads in 300ms-500ms.

~~~
weston
Very good feedback, we'll take a look at Google Pagespeeed. Thanks!

------
weston
Clickable: [http://swarmsports.com](http://swarmsports.com)

