Realigning SportingLife

For as long as I can remember I’ve kick started my day reading the latest football news on SportingLife. It’s a great source of information and covers everything from legitimate stories to gossip circulating fans forums.

In the ten years that I have been visiting this site I can’t remember it looking any different and I find this quite startling considering it is owned by BSkyB, one of the worlds largest organisations. I know people will take one look at the current website and slate it, pointing out many faults but thats not my style. For me, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with it, I type the URL into the address bar, scan down the page and look for articles which are all very easy to find, I’m in and out in minutes and I’ve got exactly what I came for. To me, this shows that the website is fit for purpose.

Why did I decide to realign the website instead of drastically overhauling it? Well, the answer is pretty simple. I’ve already stated above that I don’t have a problem with it, I just feel it could do with a few subtle tweaks and adjustments to bring it more in line with its competitors. For posterity I decided to take screengrabs of the current state of the homepage and article pages on SportingLife. You can view the home screengrab here and the article screengrab here.

The following links are my attempt at realigning the SportingLife website; home page and single page.

As you are able to see, I’ve kept many design elements from the current version but have progressed them a little. The first change you may notice is the fact that I have enlarged and centred the main content wrapper which enabled me to bump up the default font-size and let the content breathe a little better. I’ve also done the fashionable thing of adding a slightly darker background colour to let the white content block stand out more. Padding and margins have also been increased to provide larger hit areas for navigational elements and gutters between columns.

From a purely semantic point of view, the current site is a table based but I have created my version in lean semantic code; divs, uls, ols etc. I’m not saying my code is perfect, far from it. I threw this together in one evening and if I had allocated myself more time I would probably have marked it up in HTML5, perhaps I can do that at a later date.

There are many areas which I am unhappy with:

• The main callout article on the homepage, which falls under the title ‘Football Headlines’
• I feel that the module boxes which run down the right hand side could do with a little more attention but not so much as it detracts you from the main content. I just feel that at present they are a little flat.
• The inner content box on the single page which lists; bets, related links and print, email and rss could also do with some attention but I don’t feel that this is too far away from something I’d be happy with.
• I’d also quite like to update the banner to incorporate the term “football” as you could then have a banner which read “sportinglife.com/football” with the sportinglife.com being in white and the sub-folder appearing in the customary red text. This would help give users an immediate visual queue as to where they are.

Do you read SportingLife? Did you like this article? If the answer to both questions is yes, then feel free to tweet it by clicking on the big blue button below or alternatively tweeting SportingLife directly.