The Homepage Has Been Redesigned!
As you may have noticed when you clicked on this post, the FanGraphs homepage has received a makeover. The previous front page worked well enough for a number of years. The way we all use the web has changed, however, so it was time for some adjustments, intended to help you find more of what you want in an easier-to-use manner. The new layout features a number of improvements, and while change is never enjoyable, we hope you’ll find these tweaks will help you get to the content you’re looking for more quickly, as well as highlight content that you might have missed previously.
The biggest change is that the new design is responsive, meaning it will work well on mobile devices, not just desktops and laptops. We’ve also designed the new front page to highlight our daily written content, the outstanding prospect work being put together by Eric Longenhagen and Chris Mitchell, and provide access to the tools that let you utilize all the great data here on the site.
More specifically, we have:
- included the daily Hardball Times article in the featured section, highlighting one of the best-kept secrets on FanGraphs; the daily THT piece isn’t to be missed. We also changed the featured-article area to better highlight popular content, including pieces from RotoGraphs, as well as identify the most recent and most read posts of the day.
- merged InstaGraphs into the FanGraphs article flow. InstaGraphs posts are still shorter, quicker articles, but they won’t be off in the corner any longer. They will be noted by an InstaGraphs tag, so you’ll still know to expect something a bit shorter than the usual FanGraphs post.
- included our standard chat schedule and a chat-alert banner for when they are happening.
- improved the Top Prospects box, so all 30 teams are accessible instead of just the last five articles Eric Longenhagen has written.
- improved our “Essential” section to include evergreen articles and site news, and to highlight some of our data tools.
The new layout will be more dynamic, including more features as the season progresses and as certain content becomes more topical, such as during the draft or the trade deadline. We hope that these improvements will let you navigate the numerous articles we publish each day, as well as better find reference pieces that you’ll want to go back and read multiple times.
Note that not every page on the site has been made mobile-friendly yet. As we become accustomed to the new design, please don’t hesitate to let us know about any questions, comments, or further improvements that you’d like to see integrated into the new homepage.
Thanks for being loyal readers and supporting FanGraphs through the years. We hope this new front page makes your visits even more enjoyable.
I build things here.
Looks awesome. Up next, Contact% on minor league player pages?
Keep the redesign going and change the name to TroutGraphs.
Grumble, grumble, change, ergh.
looks so good!!1
Thks~~~~~!!!!
Love the redesign, but is it at all possible to keep the WAR leaders on the front page? It was one of my favorite features.
Yeah, that will eventually come back.
How come “Splits Leaderboard – time frame – filter – 1st half” doesn’t show current stats for 2017?
I really like the redesign. Nice job. Any chance Fangraphs can integrate baseball savant data onto the player pages? Brls, Exit Velocity, xBA, xwOBA, etc? That would be great!
2nd this, 1000 times over. Would be an outstanding addition.
Not a huge fan of it (yet), but I’m sure it’ll grow on me. It just seems like there’s way too much empty space on the main page right now compared to before. I know you’ve made the articles themselves a lot more mobile friendly, and I’ve REALLY liked that. If these changes to the front page also mean that it’s more mobile friendly as well, then I will definitely have no complaints for that. I’m usually here every single day, and a change to one page is certainly not going to change that.
You’re probably just used to the old landing page, which was a bit busy (to put it mildly). Your eyes will probably appreciate the negative space soon enough. (I, for one, am psyched about being able to look at Fangraphs on my phone without squinting).
You didn’t bring back NotGraphs, so I’m disappointed.
This! This! A thousand times this!
#Keepnotgraphs
Amen MikeS
Any chance we could get the post times/dates back with the articles on the homepage?
agreed, helps me figure out where I last left off
Seconded.
thirded
Agreed. This is the only thing that truly feels lacking about the redesign.
I know complaining about redesigns is the most obvious thing on the internet but I just don’t get this one. The main differences seem to be more whitespace and more scrolling to see the same content (the opposite of the stated goal of finding content more quickly). It’s not like *terrible* but it’s hard for me to find points of improvement over the previous site. There was room for positive changes, certainly, but these aren’t the changes I would have wished for.
Yeah I agree. I like how before the main page loaded and I could see the articles without scrolling. How they’re listed on this page where you can see the list of past articles is much easier to read than the new layout.
Yes, absolutely. More scrolling to see the same content. Not helping me.
I agree with these bloaks. it’s also difficult to ascertain the order of the articles…it’d be nice to know the dates articles posted as well. Not to be a jerk but the homepage redesign seems to just have moved some boxes and introduced some spacing. Maybe this was necessary for dynamic features in teh future OR it makes it super mobile friendly (and I assume many of your readers are on mobile devices), if that’s the case it makes sense. hard to see the point of this for desktop though.
At least it’s not as terrible as what they did to Hardball Talk.
If I was asked simply will this new design make you visit more or less I’d have to say less.
Yeah, I don’t really understand this. It was easy to take in all the articles the moment the page opened, as well as remember when you left off reading. I would open Fangraphs, open all the new articles from where I last left off in new tabs and then read. Now it requires scrolling down, with no dates or discernible order and half the screen real estate is just blank page.
It appears this was optimized for mobile, and it really is nice on my phone, but I visit Fangraphs on my phone maybe 1% of the time. At a desk on a monitor, it is almost entirely blank space and impossible to use.
Have to agree with southie, this design will have me visiting Fangraphs less or at the very least using bookmarks to access the blog area and leaderboard areas directly, skipping the home page entirely.
Speaking of the blog page, the image for the “Pitch Talks in San Francisco Monday Night” post is glitching out the page.
Eric Longenhagen wrote in one of his chats recently that his InstaGraphs posts weren’t getting many views and basically begged people to click on them, so my guess is that this entire redesign was done to boost page views of InstaGraphs as well as The Hardball Times. I don’t think this design was the right way to go about that, but I guess we’ll see.
Really nice makeover!
It’s better than an SBNation redesign, I guess.
Yeah that one I found totally baffling.
that one was in all likelihood about ads. It just added more space for them . I’m not the biggest fan of this but at least it’s in an effort to improve the experience
This sucks. You had it right before, please put it back.
As good of place as any I suppose to ask if the outdated player scouting reports on some player pages from 2014/2015 are either going to be updated or removed?
Muchas gracias por el rediseño responsivo…
I do like how the chat schedule is posted!
I like the schedule as well, but if you click on it it only takes you to the last one, it should have past ones indexed as a reference point. Kind of like when you clicked on a writers name it would show the last several pieces written
Agreed, but I too would like an easy way to get to one person’s previous chats from that section. That would be great.
As a web designer/developer, I couldn’t be more pleased with the mobile layout. The desktop/tablet layout is more of a lateral move, if not slightly backwards. The 2-3 paragraph preview for multiple articles was excellent.
Not to mention the main menu is still inaccessible to keyboard-only users. But you’re certainly not the only site on the internet ignoring them…
Yeah I love this on mobile, but I never access Fangraphs on a mobile device. On desktop this is borderline unusable as it is almost entirely unused space with no rhyme, reason or order. Maybe some of the empty space is being used for ads that I am blocking, but that doesn’t make it better.
Much better on mobile for sure. Much.
The desktop site looks great. But on mobile it doesn’t work as well.
I love almost all the changes that have been made to Fangraphs recently and really appreciate the improved mobile experience. However, I absolutely hate this new home page on the desktop, and find it only marginally better than the old homepage on my phone. The new design somehow feels busier while also displaying less information.
This post was buried so far down that I was lucky to have found it. The new layout makes things harder to find, there’s too much going on and yet, there’s some how excessive negative space. I’m not a fan of the new layout, and I’m not even sure what motivated the change to this since the other was considerably easier to navigate on a desktop using Chrome.
Chrome on Android was unusable. Now it works great.
I used it on my cell pone and Amazon Fire tablet (used Silk browser though) without issue.
I use chrome on android and never had issues.
terrible…straight up.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-R2jou34l1xE/VgQqyxAoX2I/AAAAAAAAREI/tyk9c92dpE0/s1600/Clint_Eastwood_disgust.gif
A perfect summary. Add me to the “Don’t really care for it” list.
Fixing what wasn’t broken. Do I really need to see the schedule of who is chatting and when?
Is there a reason why the ‘Latest’ story is not included under the Fangraphs header? I don’t love that.
Admittedly, I will probably always skip the top section and go straight to the Fangraphs section, so missing the most recent story will be a nuisance.
So far on mobile it is way way better, awesome!
The mobile design is a big improvement. A lot of scrolling, but at least everything is readable now without having to constantly zoom. The spacing works too because it’s much more difficult to fat finger the wrong link. Granted, I’ve spent like 10 minutes with it.
But yeah, the mobile gains seem to have come at the expense of the desktop experience. On desktop, there’s a bunch more scrolling and the spacing is super weird.
All that is to say that in a week or two, we’ll hopefully all have forgotten what it looked like before anyway.
I really want to like it. But I use a desktop exclusively for this site and it’s worse now.
Agree.
Where is the option to switch back to the old format?…many websites have this option now.
On a semi-related note, it would be great if members could have the option of all comments loading automatically. Currently, I have to click Load Rest Of Comments every time I read a post.
This is currently done for performance reasons. Not what we want to do, but it is currently necessary.
Thanks for the reply!
As someone who does web design/UX for a living, here’s my $0.02:
— Overall design is a classic example of a mobile-first approach resulting in a less-then-ideal desktop experience. It happens all the time. It’s very hard to design compelling desktop and mobile UX from a single content source. I agree with others that the new desktop has far too much white space and wasted real estate. The mobile looks nice, though.
— As others have commented, the article time stamps are crucial for users to orient themselves and need to be included on the homepage
— Doesn’t make sense to have a “Top Stories” module, but then bury it halfway down the page. Use analytics to monitor traffic, then expose the top-performing stories “above the fold.”
— With the modular approach to the different content categories, you should open the design to allow users to move things around for a more personalized experience – I believe CBS Fantasy lets you do this. Users love sites they can tailor based on their use cases.
Yeah this site used to be borderline unusable on mobile so I am willing to sacrifice a little on desktop to avoid that. I agree with the rest of your comment too.
I don’t love “most popular” being “above the fold”. It is a self fulfilling method that limits finding cool stuff, imo. I get it, I don’t like it.
Would love to move the modules around!
I like how I have to scroll for an hour, that i can only see 3 articles when i load the page and that the HBT gets adblocked
One request (which is separate from the redesign): Can you update player pages to list out all the teams a trader player was on? For example, there is no way of knowing what teams Zack Greinke played for in 2012 and how he performed for each team. Baseball Reference’s method is much better for this.
If I understand your request correctly, all you need to do is click on partial seasons.
How about showing what team the player is on currently at the top of the player page? Showing the drafted by team and not listing the current team has always been a bit confusing.
1 scroll down and you can see what current team a player plays for.
Really not a fan at all.
Where have Longenhagen’s daily reports gone?!?
They’ll be in the flow of the FanGraphs articles. He just didn’t write one today. Or at least hasn’t yet.
Some definite plusses on mobile — no horizontal scrolling, no tiny click targets. I’ll try to get used to the homepage, but I’m pretty disoriented now at trying to find “recent articles I didn’t read”.
Maybe you’re optimizing for readers who visit multiple times a day and never have a dozen-article backlog? That’s not crazy. But remember they grow out of once-a-day readers.
Also please add the ability to suppress modules I don’t care about. Before I just didn’t scroll over to fantasy. Now it’s mixed into my stream by opaque optimization algorithms that are sometimes real real dumb.
Where do you see fantasy mixed into your stream? Isn’t it just fangraphs in a fangraphs section, and then rotographs in a rotographs section?
Yeah, just as the entire section, not mixed to the article level. It’s not challenging to scroll past, but it’s a notch below “I just never look at the middle brown column”.
But when can we expect a prominently placed photo of Carson tending to his lawn on the front page?
Last I heard Carson had his lawn removed and he plans on sowing the earth with some buckwheat, hopefully I didn’t miss a chat where those plans changed because I’m way to interested in how his buckwheat experiment goes!
I like the new design. One add I would suggest would be to add datestamps to posts so people can easily identify new material added to the site.
BecauseFangraphs, I bet you have all kinds of analytics running on the site, right? I appreciate the writeup of the impetus behind the changes, but I would really enjoy a writeup of:
1. What specific metrics drove some of the changes (how popular were prospect writeups where you gave them their own section?)
2. A post-mortem on how the new layout affected user behavior
I can guarantee you it’s fewer article clickthroughs per homepage visit via desktop.
Would be nice, now, to get a functional site search.
Not a fan
Can we get dates in the article headers — next to the author byline/comment count for the articles, and in the title line for the podcasts? Maybe it’s just disorientation from the new layout, but I feel like I’m having trouble keeping track of what is new and what have already read/decided not to read.
Are the dates going to be next to the posts as they have been in the past? I save things to read each day and may not remember what I’ve saved and what I haven’t.
As a few have already noted in the comments thread, having the post dates/times is super helpful, and brings order to the posts so we know what’s new and where we left off.
Is there any chance of this being added back?
One thing that’s missing and is sorely needed (or maybe it’s there and just hidden?) is a link to the homepage down at the BOTTOM, underneath the comments section. Nothing worse than having to scroll all the way back up to the top just to get back to the main page, especially on a mobile device.
Virtually every other site with a comments/discussion section has this. Would be great if you guys did too.
Edit – I mean there’s a list of links including Baseball Info Solutions, Fox Sports,TangoTiger, Stats, Retro Sheet, etc but no link back to Fangraphs.com
Seems like a strange oversight, but easy to fix.
Is Carson Cistulli boycotting the new format? Don’t think there’s NERD Games Scores column for today?
absolutely cannot stand the new design
I’d be really curious to know what percentage of Fangraphs visitors do so on mobile as opposed to tablet or desktop. While this is no doubt a massive improvement on mobile, the desktop version of the new homepage is very nearly unusable. As someone who solely uses the desktop version of the website, that makes it really frustrating.
Would it not have been possible to have a desktop version and a mobile version separately? The last version made perfect use of space on a desktop and literally everything someone might need was right there, in order and properly dated, without needing to scroll.
I don’t know how to embed an image in comments, but as I look at the home page right now on my laptop without any zoom, the page is almost entirely unused space that doesn’t fill the window horizontally and cuts off just below the green line for the Fangraphs section of the page. That means when I open the page, I see links to no more than 3 articles without scrolling. On my desktop monitor (25″ 1440p, browser zoomed to 120%), I can see the the Fangraphs article section without scrolling but huge chunks of the page is completely unused white space. This website, more than most, benefits from column layouts. Please consider bringing back the previous version of the site for desktop, keeping this version for mobile. At the very, very least please bring back date and times for articles. Without that, there is no reason for me to even visit the Homepage.
I completely agree with this. And as a subscribing, always-desktop customer, I feel mildly screwed. I’d like to know the desktop/mobile breakdown not just of total users, but of subscribers.
This change alone probably won’t make me stop paying, but we’ll see where the future goes. I believe strongly in paying for content, but I also believe in not supporting businesses that treat me like second-class.
100% agree with this as a paying member who uses their desktop 95% of the time. I’ve just canceled my subscription mainly because there have been so many comments on the degraded desktop experience (which I wholeheartedly agree with) and I’ve yet to see any response to those comments, or the numerous comments about posting the dates articles were published.
My yearly subscription is Feb to Feb so you guys have a good amount of time to address these concerns or just straight up let us know that you have so many mobile viewers that the desktop experience just isn’t a priority anymore (which I totally understand since it is a business, just not one ill be willing to pay for anymore).
I am a member also and will be evaluating the changes that this redesign has on my usage. I will then make a decision to renew or cancel. It is very likely that I would have continued my membership without serious evaluation had this redesign not occurred.
It is a little disappointing that none of the staff members who have commented have responded to any of the many complaints about the desktop experience.
Perhaps I am underestimating it but I find it very hard to believe that the majority of Fangraphs users access the site via mobile. I use the mobile version of the website maybe a handful of times a season, typically to look up a quick stat on the go.
Before now, the desktop version of the website was perfect while the mobile version was difficult to use. All this did was reverse the problem and I just cannot believe the majority of users are on mobile. Even if they are, why not just have a mobile version separate from the desktop version? The desktop version was perfect before. I could access it on any computer, anywhere in the world and anything I ever needed was right there the moment the page loaded, no scrolling necessary unless I really wanted to dig deep. Now I need to scroll just to get to the articles.
I can’t help but notice the ample ad space front and center on the main page now. Three full size square ads, one of which is an autoplay video at the moment, 3 full leaderboard banner ads plus a 4th pinned to the bottom of the screen. In total, there are 8 red flagged scripts running on the main page. I have to be honest, I don’t believe the quality of the content here recently justifies a subscription and no amount of quality content justifies that many ads. I would happily pay money if it meant I could change the homepage back to the original version of the desktop or customize it in a way that suits my uses.
It’s not good. Just more ads now. Guess not enough people donated.
Just wanted to say I love the new design. I especially love that the chats are listed now in terms of day and who it is. As well as a hyperlink is provided which makes it so much easier to find than previously if I misssd a chat. Great new design, awesome website thanks for all the great work guys.
This is worse than the redesign ESPN did. I’m on the desktop and this is a complete, unnecessary mess you’ve made.
I could not agree more. So much wasted space and unnecessary scrolling to see what new content has been posted.
On the subject of changes: A few weeks ago, FG pages began showing only the first few comments on the initial load, with a separate scroll-and-click needed to load all comments.
That also degrades my FG experience. I come here as much for the comments as for the articles. Was that change ever explained? Or do we just assume it was another thing done to benefit the mobile experience, without a thought for anyone else? This desktop subscriber wants to know.
I responded to an earlier comment about this. This is a site performance related change. We were having some issues with all the comments loading impacting performance, but I would like to return it back to the way it was once we migrate to better servers in the next month or so.
Thank you for the response, David.
I don’t want to be negative, but boy I wish you hadn’t done that.
Change is not good lol – seriously, it’ll change my (English) post work beer and check of MLBTR and FG experience, but if more of the good stuff is visible, then it’s a great move.
Sean, tell me your not the guy who was closing for the A’s a few years ago. How the mighty have fallen.
“Unlikely, sir. They spell and pronounce their names differently.”
We fear change.
So this is considered an improvement?
Hope someone got a big pay raise for this idea..UGH
Count me against this change. You had a perfect front page which required no scrolling. Our office does this all year around, “improving” things that aren’t broken. There are only two reasons for changes like these. It is either cheaper to manage the site or you expect to generate more revenue( or some combo of both) It certainly isn’t driven by customer sat.
Judging by the number of ads that now occupy prominent places on the front page, I’m guessing generating more revenue is the big one. Four full size leaderboard ads and at least two, yesterday it was three, square ads. Eight red flagged scripts in total.
This article has seven ads at the moment, one of which appears to be a phishing scam, all of which are replaced by a prominent “Fangraphs now has ad free membership! Click here to subscribe” button when blocked by an adblocker.
I guess the strategy is to annoy people enough to subscribe and cash in on those who don’t. With all due respect to Fangraphs, which is one of my top 5 most visited websites year round, the content being provided lately is not even remotely worthy of a $50 subscription that has no other benefit except to remove ads, which I will now be actively blocking for free.
I’m not even one of those people who hate ads and block them all on every website, I happily allow ads on websites I feel provide me with truly special and unique content and Fangraphs was previously one of those websites. No longer. These changes are so transparently pro-revenue/anti-customer that I can’t possibly justify it. There is no way anyone, anywhere asked for these changes to the desktop version of the site. Must have been too expensive to just add a separate mobile layout.
Actually, we have slightly decreased the number of ads on the homepage, and this change had absolutely nothing to do with driving revenue. It mainly had to do with making the site more accessible, both from a mobile perspective and from an organizational perspective.
While this is not meant to be an ad discussion, in reality, content, stats, servers, etc… need to be paid for. That either has to be done through ads or membership. Ad blocking is not a sustainable option.
If you frequently visit FanGraphs, then you should consider supporting it, either by viewing the ads, and/or becoming a member. That way, we get to continue to bring you the content you expect and new content.
I have to be honest David, that’s some really backwards thinking. The content should drive revenue, not the other way around. That includes how that content is presented. Dropping a change that so drastically, and negatively, impacts the desktop viewing experience of Fangraphs makes it very difficult to justify financial support. There is a point where the quality of the content cannot overcome how it is presented, as a former ESPN Insider subscriber, I know that all too well. Fangraphs is approaching that point rapidly.
That said, as I mentioned originally, I do support Fangraphs with ad revenue. I am happy to do so as it is first rate content from some of the best writers in the business and seldom a day goes by that I don’t visit Fangraphs. Unfortunately, I can’t justify keeping my ad blocker off when I am presented with two full size leaderboard ads before I even get to the Fangraphs section and two more square ads before I get to the first article of the day on Rotographs. At least what I believe to be the first article of the day, it isn’t actually dated. Perhaps I didn’t notice that there were more ads before because I didn’t have to scroll the page down multiple times just to get to the content.
Change is a good thing. No one gets anywhere by being stagnant, baseball of all things teaches us that lesson, but a change that negatively impacts the experience of what I believe to be a bulk of your viewers solely to improve the mobile experience is not well thought out. Countless websites have separate formats for desktop/tablet and mobile, surely this could have been done. The previous arrangement was perfect for desktop as it kept things linear while also clearly separating the different aspects of the site (Fangraphs, Rotographs, Instagraphs, etc). If a reader can’t even figure out what the first article of the day is, there is something fundamentally wrong with your format.
Again, perhaps I’m underestimating how many hits you get via mobile as opposed to desktop/tablet, please let me know if that is the case but also please understand that I cannot justify supporting this site financially in any way until some adjustments are made to the new desktop layout. I doubt you’ll miss the couple of dollars a month in ad revenue I generate.
I think where we disagree, and the main point of contention was that this change was strictly prompted by making our site mobile friendly. Our goal was to make the desktop and the mobile site friendlier.
Improving the organization of the homepage on desktop had been on the to-do list for a very long time, since given the reaction to the last homepage redesign, it seemed no one was super enthusiastic about it anyway. We thought the homepage from both a mobile and desktop experience was an improvement. Obviously you did not.
Now we know and we can take your comments along with everyone else’s, along with the metrics we collect on the homepage and 1. see where things need to be improved, and 2. improve those things.
But I will say this: What I don’t understand is how you can justify continuing to use the site, while boycotting our revenue stream. Most products don’t work this way, and just because you can do this on the internet, doesn’t mean you should.
I don’t understand how you could possibly say the desktop version of the site is more friendly now. There is just no way. You may have set out with that as the goal, but the result does not match that at all, I would hope the numerous comments on this very article saying the exact same thing would get that point across.
If I can’t determine where I last left off reading because none of the entries in any of the sections are dated, there is a fatal flaw in the design. Entries without dates makes it impossible to orient myself to where I last left off. Since the change, I have elected to visit Fangraphs exclusively through separate .com/blogs and .com/fantasy bookmarks to bypass the home page entirely as those extensions still have dates. I really don’t think that is what you are going for but the dates are absolutely vital.
I’m not unsympathetic to ads for revenue and Fangraphs is a site I’ve happily white listed for a long time. That said, I now have two full width leaderboard ads shoved in my face before I get to a single link of new content, content I now need to sift through just to figure out where I last left off. I am also experiencing a TON of browser hangups since the change, to the point where Fangraphs doesn’t actually fully load on Chrome it just spins as it tries (and fails) to load all the ads.
At the very least, please bring back date stamps to the articles posted on the home page. Even better would be an unread posts button for registered users but I won’t get greedy. If you can at least give us that, I can make the rest work and I’ll happily return to white listing Fangraphs, browser hangups and all. Until then, I’m really sorry but I can’t and I do hope you understand.
Thank you for your time in responding, I do appreciate it and I appreciate everything about Fangraphs, more than I’d ever be able to explain.
looks good guys….just need the dates under the articles or way to show how hold article has been on site.
What I would like, if you make some changes:
1. I want to a drop down at the top by author. Many days I just want to see prospect stuff that I missed, like Eric’s instagraphs’ articles.
2. I want the chat section to also link to chat by author, so I can get to previous weeks quickly.
3. Not sure I understand the borders on the left and right. Seems like wasted space.
4. Dates and times shown in the Fangraphs’ section on the home page for each article.
5. Essential tools above rotographs.
6. Is instagraphs now just fangraphs? If so, how do I find Eric’s daily prospect posts? It would be great if those were linked somehow from the prospect section on the home page.
7. Really, generally, it would be great to have “sections” like “All prospect articles”.
I do like the new font, assuming I’m not imagining that in the headlines at least.
Really would love a draft “section” where all draft related articles could be linked.
Same with prospects. Give me “tags” or sections or something.
where’s the notgraphs section?
I’m going to post a quick update / response. We are certainly monitoring this thread and appreciate that people take time to share their feedback.
For instance, dates on posts (or some sort of recency indicator) seem to be a fairly widespread complaint and they will return in the very near future.
We definitely value everyone’s opinion here. The last time we did a home page redesign in 2012, it was widely hated. Actually, in my opinion it was received far worse than this current redesign.
Here are some of the more scathing comments from the previous redesign:
“This…is an ugly mess of unorganized words. ”
“The previous site was cluttered and navigation was not intuitive. This new site is worse.”
“it looks like it has been designed by someone in the dark”
” *OW-OW-OW* my eyes.”
“this site is north korea now”
“This new layout is horrific.”
We even had a fun NotGraphs post.
My point is, 5 years ago, the majority of people did not like the new site design. In the five years since, it seems that people have gotten used it / actually decided they liked it. This seems to be how site design generally goes.
We do care a lot about what everyone thinks of the site design and will certainly implement changes and take feedback into consideration. That is generally how we operate with everything we do on the site.
But, we also wanted to give people a few days to air their grievances and then see where we’re at. Since site redesigns generally don’t go super great anyway, and sometimes it can be tricky, at first glance, to separate aversion to change and things that we actually need to address.
Would love to see a feature like medium that says how long each article will take to read – would help me prioritize throughout my day 🙂
Thanks for the update!
Thanks for the reply David its much appreciated. While I’ve been a daily reader of the site for 8 years or so I’ve only started to comment and pay for membership for the past couple years. Therefore if I had commented on the previous redesign it would have been more of a “hurrah” than anything else.
I see you’ve posted some of the negative comments from the previous redesign (I have not gone to that post to read the comments myself) and one thing that stands out is the asinine tone of those comments, in contrast to what I think are fairly well thought out and presented criticisms of this redesign. Not to say that there aren’t some less “thought out” comments to this redesign.
My main gripe would be much easier to illustrate if I had an old screen shot of the previous homepage compared to this one (and knew how to post a screenshot in a comment…). In the past as soon as I opened the homepage I was able to see the entire days posting for both Fangraphs and Rotographs without any scrolling, unless it happened to be the odd day with a dozen new articles on one side or the other. I do fully realize these are 1st world problems and that scrolling is not a huge deal but the old layout was just so easy to use with an M3 button clicking down each of the lists to open up new tabs for all the articles.
Is Rotographs readership so far below Fangraphs that you can’t justify it having such “prime” placement? Because the layout definitely puts Rotographs a rung-down from Fangraphs (or a scroll-down…terrible) Again as stated in a previous comment I realize this is a business so if thats the case I can understand.
If I had to slap a number on it I would say that it takes a good 500% longer (conservatively) to open up tabs for all the new articles of the day when I get home from work. I don’t know if it’s possible but even a link that just opens new tabs for all the articles published that day would be AWESOME.
Change itself is not at all the issue as there are a number of new things that I’m a big fan of: Chat schedule, team prospect list, team pages are amazing. Though I feel those could have just been sectioned in below the old article lists beside community research or something. Yes, I realize this is scrolling but those are secondary features.
As I stated in my last comment I’ve been a happily paying member for a couple years (ad-free) but was a bit put off by the lack of response to us “old-school” desktop users and am glad that you’ve taken the time to respond, even if its in a way that says “we hear ya….but nothing is really going to change much from what it is beyond some tweaks” hahaha
Without ads there is a lot of white space on the home screen in the Fangraphs and more so in the Rotograph sections, again not sure if its possible but even just a random Fangraphs logo or much cooler your favourite teams logo thats a link to their teams page. Just something other than blank space.