Discussion of CelticsBlog Upgrades

[317]

checked from my phone and its horrible that way, and i never had any app to improve it. i will stop checking this site from my phone well at games, something i used to do frequently when a player got hurt during a game or was inactive for an unknown reason.

never noticed the trending thing before, this is a Celtics basketball site, i dont want to see links to football videos. the pictures at the top are just to big.

the inability to skim now is bad. the fact they didn't bother to make it compatible with some versions of IE shows them being lazy.

i ripped a few things from my viewing with a remove it permanitnly add on, but that's not addressing the issues its just hiding them. the site is to long, part of that is those big pictures at the top. but even without some of the empty space, and without the things i simply dont want to see its still to long.

i also feel like the Team|Community|Sections|Library thing should be at the top of the page.

[Mencius]

I liked the tight and concise feel of the old look.  Everything seemed much more readily accessible to me.  This seems to have a lot of frill, way more pictures, and a lot more scrolling is involved.  Some of it is surely not being used to the look/feel of this new thing, but some of it is that there is, it seems, a lot more fluff to get through to get to the meat.  To me, it seems busy for busy's sake.  I don't like it.

[crownsy]

As one who enjoyed the advantage of skimming the stories to see their premise, the site just got far less functional.  The change puts a huge premium on the writing composition of each headline, so readers won't waste their time clicking on a post only to find they're not interested in it.

Also, I cynically wonder how much this change was intended to force readers to click more.  The new layout gives you far less at a glance, and compels you to click for any content at all!  The most obvious reason for such a change is to increase ad views per site visit.  More money for the blog, at the expense of usability.  Not a good tradeoff, in my opinion.

oh it's absolutely designed that way by SB Nation. Thats what bleacher report did and they got that paper, and it's what the gawker site just did.

By making everything involve multiple clicks you can sell more ads. It seems like more and more clean, efficient and simple is being phased out for "come on, give us three clicks, be a sport."

[Mencius]

..

[Prof. Clutch]

Every time Celticsblog gets a facelift everyone gets a little freaked out, which is understandable since you have to learn anew how to navigate the site.  But every time it's happened a little time passes and most people can't even remember how the old site used to look, let alone miss it.  In the end it's still the same community of people contributing so the true essence of Celticsblog remains the same.

I come here primarily for the forums anyway and those appear to be entirely unchanged, so I guess the changes to the front page don't really have any effect for me.

Congrats on the new digs Jeff & Mods.

[kozlodoev]

In the end, I'll just end up going directly to forums.celticsblog.com instead.

[guava_wrench]

I liked the tight and concise feel of the old look.  Everything seemed much more readily accessible to me.  This seems to have a lot of frill, way more pictures, and a lot more scrolling is involved.  Some of it is surely not being used to the look/feel of this new thing, but some of it is that there is, it seems, a lot more fluff to get through to get to the meat.  To me, it seems busy for busy's sake.  I don't like it.

I agree with the sentiments.

It seems to me that a lot of sites are going touch-friendly. Hulu has a similar change that made it harder too use, but with more eye candy. Crapplications like flipboard prioritized fancy, picturesque layouts over ease of use. I'm someone who always hated windows folders in any layout other than details, unless it is a folder of image files.

I miss having article summaries. This also no longer has the blog feel. I liked the blog feel. I do not think I am feeling resistance to change because I just don't care for these kinds of image heavy formats in general, just as I don't care for Facebook timelines. Save it for pinterest.

[AshyLarry]

WOOOOOOAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! ITS ALL FUTURISTIC AND WHATNOT. A+

[ItStaysYang]

Ladies and Gents, listen here and listen well.

SBNation is all about making money. Poof Jeff had no say in the abysmal "upgrades" that took place here recently. CB had function before, and now as others have said, it's redundant, unnecessary, and as a software engineer/designer, the layout is extremely poor. Space is misused and NO consideration went towards the users by whatever team did this. This was my topic.... and they changed the name, I said it sucked originally and I uphold my opinion.

This company doesn't give a rats ass about people who love sports, they want to compete with the ESPN Boston's and hoopshype-type sites (and other sites that are just plain bigger). SBNation has lost its niche of having "individually-based sports blogs" by trying to take that same small-picture success and blow it out of proportion.

No offense to anyone here at CB (staff, members, Jeff), but SBNation - you suck and your updates suck.

Lets get it reversed: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/revert-the-new-sbnation-blog-changes/

[AshyLarry]

My previous comment was sarcasm. I don't mind it. I don't like it. But I'll get used to it. I'm just pod because now I have to click on things more often lol.

[lon3lytoaster]

The mobile site is probably the worst thing I have ever seen. And I will be hemmorging data when I'm not on wifi. As someone who uses his phone for almost everything these days that's problematic. It's slow to load and just.. I don't know. Terrible.

[Roy H.]

One thing I like about it, as an author:  On the old software, if there was a big story followed by smaller news, we had to make an editorial decision regarding whether to put the newer but lesser news at the top of the page, or instead to "bury" it under the older story.

This software solves that dilemma.  The "big" story can still be front and center, while also giving exposure to other new content.

[blink]

Although I really really appreciate all the efforts of the folks at celticsblog, I really think the new page layout is poorly designed. 

As others have mentioned, it is kind of a bloated, over sized, badly organized mess.  I miss the article previews as well, but I miss the straight forward organization of the old version even more.  The old site did way more with way less.  I hope I get used to it, but if not, I will just bookmark the forums directly to avoid it.  I guess that says it all.

[kozlodoev]

One thing I like about it, as an author:  On the old software, if there was a big story followed by smaller news, we had to make an editorial decision regarding whether to put the newer but lesser news at the top of the page, or instead to "bury" it under the older story.

This software solves that dilemma.  The "big" story can still be front and center, while also giving exposure to other new content.

Maybe the new situation has taken the decision out of your hands, but I don't think it has solved the issue of how to make news of different magnitude accordingly readable.

I thought CB authors did a phenomenal job when deciding which green blurb to keep on top of the feed

[Interceptor]

I thought CB authors did a phenomenal job when deciding which green blurb to keep on top of the feed

Indeed. I never had any quarrels with front page priorities, I got used the articles moving around after I noticed that the big stories were the prominent ones. It worked because there was enough real estate on the page to notice the lesser stories underneath the headliner one.

I guess that this technically an improvement, although it wasn't immediately clear that Brandon Bass was even a story until I found the text in the middle of the picture.