NFL Website Revamp

It's better

As an nfl.com regular I noticed when they went live with the new site. It is generally very good though there is at least one large problem. I'd like to know your thoughts or even better send them to the NFL directly from here and tell them a football blogger put you up to it.

I demand the NFL take blogs and other non-traditional media outlets seriously starting right now. Those of us that toil like this on our own tirelessly to promote the NFL for free are truly the serfs of the league and if every reader that sees this piece tells the league they read NFL blogs and if every blogger that reads this post asks their readers to send a similar sentiment then maybe they will hear us.

What do I like about the new site?
It's very AJAXey with lots of rollover. Main categories, (Teams, Stats, Schedule etc) are still at the top and now menus pop up right off the main category link.

Example: on the old site, to get to the Redskins team site on nfl.com I had to nav to Teams > Redskins. Now I just mouse over Teams and I see a two-column list with all the teams.

Search is improved. There is a general Search on the main page and you can search by Player now as well. I never understood why these features were not there before and the answer must have been architecture or laziness.

Images are more easily available and they are displayed at higher resolution (great for bloggers). The sorting is better and it looks as though we will be able to find the pics we want from a specific game more easily, but unfortunately it does not look like history is enabled for this feature, just some of 2006 and 2007 as it comes in (to the new system of organization no doubt). It may well be that the NFL's image archive is like one big hard drive and they need to hire an out of work blogger to go through them one by one and organize them.

The link to the Photos page is here, but when I went back from it to the main page, I got some errors, so the league is still working out the kinks. As I look at the page now, there a few clusters of errors where widgets or java did not fire, with error messages like

/widgets/home/hp_inhouse2 did not create a valid page to decorate.

and

/widgets/home/nfl_on_the_web did not create a valid page to decorate. /widgets/home/promotions did not create a valid page to decorate. /widgets/home/around_the_league did not create a valid page to decorate.

Little things like rollover images are good additions. Now when you nav to the player stats you don't just see the leader for each category, when you mouse over each player you see his player photo in the image box. Check it out here.

Blah blah there's video and stuff but I'm behind on that so I can't really appreciate it yet.

The coolest things follow.

Historical players. Finally you can find a player that is not on a current roster, which may be Slingin Sammy Baugh or maybe even Aaron Brooks. I always thought it was weird that the NFL guys would eliminate a player from the active rolls within minutes of his separating from the team. Tiki Barber for example is not on a team but he was last year. You could still find his nfl.com player card by googling Tiki Barber NFL, but unless you could find a disappeared player in a stat link from a past game, there was no other way to see them, and historically they only went back a couple of years anyway. I found Earnest Byner and Sammy Baugh, and I'm pretty satisfied, though I'd like to hear about what others find (or don't find).

Stats stats and more stats. You can now look at team stats that go back decades. The new Redskins team stats page has a dropdown that goes all the way back to 1932 (though 1932, 1933 and 1934 return an error, 1935 is the first year with stats available).

The team Schedule feature now goes back farther, to 1999 which was by the way when lifetime Eagles fan, season ticket holder and Curly R reader/lurker Wilbert Montgomery and I started our streak of 15 of the last 16 Eagles-Redskins games.


What don't I like about the new site?
No historical stats! Individual player stats, now here, have no dropdown for past years. On the old site you could at least go back two or three years to see which players were statistically the best. They need to add this.

No historical stats! League stats, now here, same thing. I used to could go back a few seasons to see how the teams matched against each other statistically. They need to add this.

Why can't we have the historical rosters as well? We have the team stats and schedule back for years. Now that you have the historical players in there why can't we have rosters that go back at least as far as the schedule?


What's missing?
Well obviously more stats. I have a complete collection of NFL Record & Fact Books from 1990 (1989 season) to 2007 (2006 season) so I can get whatever stat and game summary I want but I WANT IT ALL ONLINE!

Blogger and alt-media tools. Comprehensive logos, including helmets, historical logos, images and colors, all with a fair use policy. Sure it's all out there on the web (this is a must-have bookmark for any sports blogger) but they should maintain a library and give it to us. Again, we are making them money for free. How about even a place where you can upload your photos and videos from the game and grant them fair use to alt-media?

I know I know the league is becoming more frigid to the touch of the media and if the Washington Post can't get more than 45 seconds out of the team, then we get nahthing.

Anyone else have comments on the new site?



3-d NFL logo uncredited image from Post Game Heroes here.