Well to clarify, I should have said relevant to me. I get news from a myriad of sources, espnboston.com for sports, BostonMagazine.com for general stuff, BostInno for tech but I usually read national and int'l outlets over local.
Just went to Boston.com sports this morning, not sure when it went it changed, but the new format is in effect, and it is terrible. First impression from a quick glance, the bar across the top has links for just the 4 big teams, 4 columnists, and the Marathon (which I'm sure will go away), then the main window has 7 top articles, a short list of trending articles, and then it's just a never ending list of articles, where you can just keep scrolling, I assume infinitely. If you want to see news on soccer, colleges or high schools, I don't see any way to get to a sub list of articles on it. The fact that the Revs no longer have a heading is not even near a main issue for me, the format itself is just awful. For a news type site, I like being able to view links many articles in one screen, but in this set-up you can only see a handful, and you have to scroll and scroll to view others, which is just a very user unfriendly way to set up a main page for a site, in my opinion. And with no obvious links to see articles on HS or college articles, along with soccer articles, the site is even more useless for locals. I know that many here have given up on the site, but I just figured it was worth mentioning. There might be a way to find sub-pages for HS/college articles, scores and such, but it's not obvious from a quick view, and if it's not obvious, a person is just going to go elsewhere, like the Herald. My opinion of their site had been going down for a while, I'm not even slightly upset or anything, I'm just amazed they would purposefully "upgrade" to something that was so bad.
I saw the same thing. It's simply awful. I was even trying to check on the Red Sox score the other day and couldn't find it because there was buried deeply under Papi Stories, pine tar stories, Sports Player's wives, etc... Obviously this is set up to place the stories in order by monitored trending and feeds. It's useless to any intellectual person. It's driven by what the ninnies, celebrity sponges and the hoi polloi want to see; that is: gossip and ancillary stories surrounding the main subject. It's sad when the Union College Hockey team trumps the Revs. This is the way the ratings based world is going.
I too noticed the new look of boston.com this morning. I agree with metoo above that there are no obvious links for HS, college, or soccer articles With that in mind I viewed the page source. I find it interesting that the meta tag descriptions are "Boston sports news on baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, college and high school sports, including Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, Patriots and more." Looking at the code I have an idea of how the pages are organized. For example, the link to the Patriots sections is as follows: <a href="/sports/football/patriots?p1=Levelone_Nav_sports_patriots">Patriots</a> Based on the link I guessed that there might be a /sports/soccer section and there is a soccer section (http://www.boston.com/sports/soccer/) That page appears to be built with subsections for "All", Revolution, MLS, and Corner Kicks Blog. There really is not any content at this point, but perhaps there will be soon? I do not know how anybody is supposed to find this soccer section without seeing how the pages are being built/organized and then taking a guess. I do not know how anybody is supposed to find other currently "hidden" sections either? Perhaps there will be more link/menu functionality soon? For those interested, I did find the college section (http://www.boston.com/sports/colleges) I also found the high school sports section (http://www.boston.com/sports/schools) Finally, I some of my guesses were wrong along the way and I found the new sports error page featuring Bill Buckner.
Great job trying to identify the site's structure. However, it's not just soccer that's missing - there's a broken link for me when I click on the article about the Bruins-Wings series and it sent me to a broken link with 'mobile' in the URL (even though I'm not on my phone). Small icons, broken links, the new site sucks.
Ya, maybe it's under construction but I can tell you Corner Kicks Blog is being eliminated. Julian said as much.
I know. It really seems like this site must have been rushed out the door. I have also found placeholders for tennis, golf, lacrosse, and a few other sections. I guess that some of the "hidden" sections like soccer just contain placeholders for whatever might be included in the long term plan. Kind of like having open roster spots after the season starts Just kidding. I have also noticed that some links do not do what I thought they would. The Bruins section has what appear to be different articles (left column, article 2 and 3) that go to the same link, but one link is mobile and one is not. Some pages failed the first few times I try to load them on different browsers and I have seen some odd error messages. I see some stuff in the code about items for the footer that I do not see rendered and I occasionally see a BetaRelease Bocton.com image on the main header. I am assuming that the site will continue to evolve in a production environment. Not ideal, but kind of like how the Revs continue to evolve after the regular season starts. Boston.com has a plan and I trust them to deliver and make finding my revolution, high school, lacrosse, and college sports news easy to find. I kid, I kid Maybe we do not want Henry and Co to buy the Revs? Look what they have done to Boston.com!
They split a lot of their content off onto BostonGlobe.com, FWIW, and instituted a subscription policy. http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports
I'm assuming it's not a coincidence that they're rolling out these changes on the one year anniversary of the Marathon bombings, when they're surely experiencing higher than normal traffic on the site.
Well, I'd think they would have all those place holders for items thought to not be worthy of a permanent spot, but likely to put on the top bar at some point when those subjects are of greater interest, like the marathon now, so that it's a simple matter of changing the page. I'm sure during the World Cup, soccer will be on that line, not that I have any plans to go verify this assumption at that time, I don't need to go to boston.com to find the latest AP stories on soccer. Well, I thought he actually said that the existing posts would be archived. Of course, they don't put up a way to find the archives, but it's heartwarming to know they're there, somewhere...
I agree that events will come and go in the same real estate that currently features a header for the marathon section, but I think they just have bad "information architecture" at this point and rushed out the door for the anniversary of the bombing as Crooked posted above. I am sure it will get better in time. The techies are probably not happy with the current state of the site, but those is power probably pushed for a date and made some compromises to hit the date. It would be interesting for the boston.com techies to look at the search terms being entered on the sports section since the launch of the new website. These search terms will tell them what people want to see, but cannot find. Those search terms will indicate what parts of their design/IA and possibly content need to be improved.
They did cover last weekend's game against Houston, but it is strange to see no obvious mentions of them anywhere.
Even just trying to find the baseball standings was impossible. You'd think that would be something they'd make accessible, sinc ethere are a lot of people who'd want that info, unlike our furrin fringe sport