OT Si.com redesign

BradyFTW! said:

The new si.com is responsive; the desktop version of the site is completely different from the mobile version (checked it out on my iphone).

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To me a responsive site is one on which you see the layout adapt — respond — as you change the screen size of your browser window; one site for many devices. If I shrink my browser window on si.com I don't see that. On MMQB, I do.

BradyFTW! said:

I don't like the design: I think it's overdone and places form over function, but that's a separate issue. All in all, if it was a site that I navigated regularly, I'm sure that I would get used to it, but there's a strong argument to be made that if your users have to 'get used to' your site, you've already made a mistake.

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Yup. Gotta remember the classics.

Uncle Rico said:

To me a responsive site is one on which you see the layout adapt — respond — as you change the screen size of your browser window; one site for many devices. If I shrink my browser window on si.com I don't see that. On MMQB, I do.



Yup. Gotta remember the classics.

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Definitely, I totally agree. I'm with you on the definition of a responsive site, and by that definition si.com is responsive. The new site does respond to changes in window resolution, but it's very common for even responsive sites to have an entirely separate version that's launched when a mobile browser user agent is detected. The screen real estate on smartphones is just too limited for traditional websites to be an optimal fit, regardless of responsiveness.

To me, si.com is the kind of site that we'll look back on in a few years the same way that we look back on ultra flash-heavy sites from the late 2000s now. They were trying to push the envelope a bit and check every possible box re: current website trends and tablet-friendly design, and in the process of doing all of that, they forgot to make sure it was a good, functional website. What's the point of making your site responsive if it's going to give desktop users a bad experience? We may not be a sexy audience anymore, but we're still a huge percentage of the traffic that any website gets. That's especially true for a site like SI, I would bet, where a ton of their traffic is just bored people killing time at work.

One thing that I will give it credit for is that it's actually pretty good on an iPad, where the headlines form the right edge of the page, and all of the content that's right of them on a desktop is pushed down and to the left. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this site was designed specifically for iPads, with people who actually use computers being basically an afterthought. I really wish tablet-specific websites would become more of a thing, because all of these new sites that are trying to meet in the middle generally just suck on desktops.

captain stone said:

What a mess. I should've figured that something was amiss when their draft coverage/tracker
was so terrible. Come to think of it, their draft coverage/tracker sucked last year too.

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It's absolutely horrible. Beyond that, it's definitely the trend these days. If they're doing it for the sake of phones and tablets, the least they could do is split it off into a separate mobile only page (which many sites ie espnboston do). Because it's effectively unusable for me on a computer.

It just screams ADHD.

I have accidentally gone there a couple times in the last few days, but I'm done with that site for now. It's useless to me.