FanGraphs Gets Wider
You may have noticed that the look of FanGraphs has changed slightly. It is now 200 pixels wider, in some places. The homepage for instance takes advantage of this space, while most pages don’t quite take advantage of the space yet.
I’ll be working hard to fill in this space with hopefully useful sidebar boxes that give extra information about the player. In some spots, the data tables with be widened instead to allow for more stats and easier viewing. If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see in that space, now is the time to speak up.
However, it’d be disingenuous of me to say that the only reason I’ve widened the page is to just add more content. I’ve been reluctant to put real ads up on the site for some time, but unfortunately there will have to be some advertisements to help pay for the site’s expenses.
With that said, I’m not going to clutter up the entire page with ads or anything and will attempt to keep them to a minimum with tasteful placement that doesn’t disrupt any of the site’s content.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
It looks really nice, David! Keep up the great work. I love this site and completely realize ads are necessary.
Value wins for pitchers on the homepage?
Seconded.
Done!
On adverts:
Why not take the baseball ref. approach and allow fans to sponsor each individual player? Your Win Value section and wOBA make this the number one choice for checking players stats for the sabremetrically inclined fan, and I think you might be able to generate some nice revenue through this.
That’s a good idea!
I’ve thought about doing the sponsor approach, but I’m not sure how easy the system is to set up.
From my point of view, I’d like to continue focusing on baseball and the site and just let someone else deal with the advertisements, but maybe setting up a sponsor system is more difficult than I’m making it out to be.
Well at first you can simply manually edit them in. Then, if it becomes successful [and thus making some nice money] you can look at other options, like a slight redesign or even pay some poor student a few quid a week to do the coding.
As long as you keep the costs down at first, you can’t lose. And I’m taking first dibs on the Jamie Burke page if you do it. 😉
Quid = money?
The redesign looks great! Doesn’t sacrifice any simplicity, which is nice.
For those with widescreen monitors such as myself, I would love if the content were centered rather than placed all the way to the left. It makes it much easier to read.
As to ads, I think that’s great since you guys definitely deserve to make some money. Unfortunately I use AdBlock, maybe you should also do donations? I definitely donate to a bunch of sites, just as long as they don’t get too pushy. I unsubscribed and stopped visiting Baseball Musings years ago when he devoted a post a day for a full month begging for donations.
Thanks for all of the great work.
I know when I was originally coding the site I did have it centered, but I think there was a problem with the scroll bar popping in and out on certain browsers, which I remember being the reason for the left alignment.
I kind of prefer it left aligned now and sorry to say that unless there’s a lot of requests to center it, it’ll probably stay left aligned for the time being.
I’m gonna have to second the center request.
You can’t alienate people that have older monitors with smaller screen resolutions. The more viewers that come to the site the better because FanGraphs makes $$$$ off the hits for its advertisers. Changing the alignment of the content would be a BAD thing, trust me.
One more thing, there are some .dtd tags that would be able to change the document structure depending on the user. Just something to consider if you guys are still open to tweaking the site (althought that would be a little more time consuming).
I’d imagine the site will stay at it’s 950 pixel width for quite a while since there’s a very large group of people who use 1024×768 monitors.
The group with the 800×600 pixel monitors has dropped to under 2% of the total visitors, so didn’t seem worth it to continue catering to that crowd.
I could adjust based on resolution, but I have enough trouble formatting for 1 resolution. Probably not worth it right now.
Best. Baseball. Website. Ever.
Hey question. With the new format how can you search for articles? I only see the search for players… Thanks
If you click on the “Blog” page: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogroll.aspx There’s a searchbox right above the authors.
It will return to the nav bar eventually, but still trying to figure out the best way to do it.
Customizable color schemes! I’ve been staring at kelly green against a beige backdrop for almost three years now. No, that’s not a serious suggestion. I just get bored easily.
More advertisements, though. ESPN’s front page is virtually indistinguishable from a giant Subway ad. If it weren’t for trace amounts of sports content you’d swear you were at Subway.com. The lack of clutter here is actually disconcerting.
Oh, I thought of a serious one. I was thinking maybe listing more posts in the Recent Comments box and/or including a link to a separate page with an expanded list (doesn’t need to be huge) would sustain activity in older threads. Threads tend to die immediately after they’ve been pushed off the first page (and sometimes sooner), and on the rare occasions that there are responses to non-front page threads, like this response to one of your Daily Graphings over three years after the fact, they tend to go largely unnoticed unless they happen to be one of the five most recent comments at the time of viewing.
Oh, that’s another thing. It’s kinda hard to pick out the links in the comment section since they’re neither bolded nor underlined (though I suppose one could easily do that manually) and only appear slightly darker than the rest of the text. I’ll bet some of you wouldn’t have even been able to tell that the phrase “this response” near the end of the last paragraph contained a link had the surrounding text not implied that it did. If I had just thrown in a random link without any indication, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people didn’t even realize it was there. If this would take any more than, say, five minutes of coding, it’s probably not worth it and I’ll just stick to bolding and underlining links myself or using the Website field to link to relevant pages.
Back to the first point, I like what Tango has on his blog, wherein the recent activity on the sidebar is ten deep and runs twenty deep with an archive at the bottom.
Just a thought as I don’t know how large the demand or degree of difficulty of implementation of any of this actually is. As a person who spends more time on this site than he’d care to admit, anything that would stimulate poster activity would be neat.
I put something like this in the sidebar last night for comments that runs 20 deep and I’ll fix the link highlighting in the comments. I know that’s been mentioned a bunch of times.
David, you’re golden. Thanks a million.
The link thing wasn’t even a big deal. It just happened to come up while I was typing and I got carried away as I’m wont to do. The ease of bolding one’s own links (and the scarcity of links, for that matter) makes this certainly not a top priority.
Commenting on player pages?
The FanGraphs logo in the top left corner got all smushed together. I think it looks better when it’s more of a rectangle shape than a square. I realize that it’s not a square right now, but what I’m saying is I think it looks better when the dimensions are closer to 5 x 1 than 2 x 1
Not going to argue with you on that one, but it’s more or less a compromise to fill in the space. Expanded the box, kept the words/logo the same dimensions. It was the best solution I could think of, but I’m still thinking of a better way to do it.
That’s not really what I meant…. I mean that the old logo used to stretch out to where it said “Leaders” but now it only stretches out to “Home.” I’m just saying I liked the old look better. I could be in the minority, however.
People who use ad blocking software are lame. How do you expect guys like this to make money? Pop up blockers I understand, but ad/flash blocking people are idiots. You don’t have to click through it, dummies.
Oh, by the way. You should center this whole scheme. Right now, it’s right aligned, which is almost as lame as ad blockers. Center the whole thing by putting a DIV around everything and doing align=center. Screw those CSS purists, just do that cuz it will guarantee the center alignment.
I meant, it’s left-aligned. Sorry. Okay, I’m leaving now.
So with this change how long will it be before PA, CS, IBB, And HBP are added back into the standard stats section of the team and leader pages? These have always been in the standard stat section of the player pages and I have never understood why they were not in any section of the team and leader pages.
I say:
Keep the sight left-aligned, and put in more ads! I’m not sure if you do the cost per click, or cost per impression but until you get to the point where you’ve at least made minimum wage, and everyone that’s helped has made minimum wage — ads are essential.
Websites sneak up on you and steal your time and if you can’t at least make minimum wage for your time, then somethings wrong.
I look at websites like baseball players really. You never know when their careers are going to end, so you can never fault them for trying to make as much money as possible while the time’s right.
As long as the talent is there, or content, no one will complain.
Just don’t Mike Hampton the situation.
I’ll complain. Does the average free agent honestly contribute ten million dollars of value to society annually?
Site’s perfect though.
To society? of course not. To the owners who are the one’s footing the bills, of course. Somehow even with revenue sharing skewing the economics of this less-than-free-market the Yankees manage to make money.
Selig and his 20 Million Dollar pay-check has managed to make the owners cash-money. It used to be nothing more than a Prestige-thing to own a sports team. Now, it might make financial-sense..maybe.
Was the cast of Friends worth 1 Mill each, per episode? Not to society. Were they worth 1 Mill each to NBC — damn right.
I’ll have to contend the Friends point as well.
one million per Friend x six Friends / twenty million viewers = thirty cents per view
Did the six of them provide thirty cents of entertainment per viewer per episode? I’d have to say yes.