One of the sites I have followed faithfully for the last 14 years is the US PGA Tour website. I first hooked into following the Pga Tour carefully after reading John Feinstein's magnificent A Good Walk Spoiled which is one of the finest sports books I have ever read.
Feinstein gave me a taste for following the lesser players who are battling to make it in golf and it's a habit I still have today, with my favourite player being the little known Australian, Gavin Coles, who has won several times on the secondary tours over there, but has never managed to keep his playing privileges when he's played the main tour. Gavin's only 5 foot 5 and wears glasses more befitting a university academic than a professional athlete, which only adds to his appeal for me!
My primary method of following these players has been via the PGA Tour website, which provided articles, video clips and live leaderboards! It's a habit of mine on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday mornings to check the scores on the varying tours.
The site was well laid out and provided a simpler leaderboard if you had trouble with the main leaderboard that had a few more bells and whistles. Both leaderboards usually loaded quickly. The mobile leaderboard was actually better as that provided the full record of the player's round with 1 click, you could read through every shot the player had made, on every hole, as just the player's scores don't give you a great picture of the sort of round that they had. Was it a par where they missed a 3 foot birdie putt? Or a par where they hold out from a bunker? Same result, but a very different path to it. I never quite understood why that wasn't added to the main site but enjoyed it as a perk when I was reading the site on my smartphone, which I usually do as checking the sites is largely a morning thing due to the time difference between USA and Australia.
The layout had been much the same for a long time now, so it wasn't a total surprise to log on to a new site one morning. It was a surprise to find just how much functionality was sacrificed with the upgrade. The new leaderboards are far slower to load, they're also gigantic compared to the others, so the amount of scrolling required is considerable, so it's very time consuming. Finding articles and videos is much harder as the the site has also been made considerably larger, which means seeing things at a glance is much harder as there's less to see.
The latest 'improvement' is that they make the bells and whistles load for whoever is leading. I can make my own damn decision about whose details I want to see! And the bells and whistles are quite clunky and sloooooow so I rarely use them even though the information is good. It was such a shock yesterday to click on the Senior PGA Championship leaderboard and have it all up in a second or 2, with only a small touch required to view the leaderboard from top to bottom!
The bottom line is that I'm not visiting the site as often, nor am I clicking on the leaderboards as often and I'm reading less articles than I used to. This has become a permanent shift. Most website upgrades do take a little while to get used to. This revamp involved so large a loss of functionality that I can't adapt to it without a frontal lobotomy to remove my memory of when the site was quick, simple and easy to use!
Are there any website upgrades that have pissed you off? Let me know in the comments
2 comments:
It doesn't piss me off because I've never checked it before!!!
Ahh, so you didn't check the site just to see what the layout looked like? :)
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