Critique of Web designs

ESPNet Sports Zone

Resnick: The final one we're going to look at is ESPNet Sports Zone. ESPNet Sports Zone, like word.com did not originate as a print publication. It has the backing and the content of ESPN, but it's a multimedia production by Paul Allen who founded Star Wave, which as you probably know, does CD-ROM. Now they've gotten onto the Web in a big way. They have a number of different publications including Outside Online, Mr. Showbiz and Family Planet. And what they're doing, and I think this is very savvy, is not approach the Web as one unified market, but rather they segment that market, targeting it in the hopes of generating both traffic and advertisers. They've been very successful so far.

I'm not a sports fan, but if I were, this is the site that I would be logged onto 24 hours a day. If you take a look at it, it's the perfect blend, as far as the homepage design goes, of TV remote control channel changer and the layout of a top, a first-rate newspaper or magazine. So you get the news. You can read all the content you want, but at the same time, you could surf around from section to section, department to department. If I were a sports fan, I would have one hand on the remote control and the other on my mouse, so I could not only watch ESPN, but I could be surfing around the Net, getting all the statistics and play-by-play while chatting with the players and doing all that fun stuff. This is a huge site. Its homepage may look like the homepages of other sites, but the fact is, they produce something on the order of 4,000 pages a day, just from this ESPNet Sports Zone site. And that's in addition to 9,000 fixed pages. The amazing thing about it is when you go around the site, it is marvelously well organized, and you never get lost. It's easy to return to the homepage. It's easy go from section to section and to zero in on exactly what you want. So I have no hesitation about giving ESPNet Sports Zone two thumbs up.

Cole: Well, I guess if you're not a sports fan, and I'm not a sports fan, we're not going to have much disagreement here, because we don't know what we're talking about. The last professional football game I attended, Nixon was in the White House. And the last professional baseball game I attended, Carter was in the White House. So, I'm not really a person to pick nits about whether they've got the right baseball statistics or the right football stuff. But there's no question that this site is very well designed. The graphics and content are both very, very high quality. I would feel very, very comfortable recommending people go visit it. I can only give it one thumbs up because I just don't care.

Seybold: I guess we got a problem because we have three non-sports fans up here. [Laughter] And that gives me the only problem I have with this site: I find I don't spend very much time in it because, just sort of poking around in the thing, the content is not something that grabs me a whole lot. I don't have a deep abiding interest in a good deal of the stuff that's there. I find that when that happens, I begin to be bothered by download delays and things of this sort, and I lose patience and stuff. I would probably have more patience for it if I was really interested in the subject matter.

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