My first impression of this site is that it is very busy and cluttered with a ton of advertisement; Chevrolet, Toyota, Evony, mlbtv, blackberry etc. A video of Ben Revere’s life story starts without you clicking on it, I found this very annoying. Every couple of minutes the video would play all by itself. Once I clicked on another link the speed to the next link was fairly quick but I had a hard time finding my way back to the home page.
Besides that it does have a lot of helpful information at your fingertips, schedules and replays of previous games, target field information, when the next game is and you can even find restaurant advertisement/deals that are close to target field; buy a $50 gift card for half price.
I agree with you that the MN Twins site is much cluttered. I find it interesting that the site appears to try to over power you with all that information. The part I liked most was that you could slid over the main selections (News, Scoreboard, Stats, fans, ECT) to get to the sub menus, this is very helpful if you have a slow connection.
ReplyDeleteI believe the TWINS use a website format designed by the Major Baseball League (MLB). So take a look at the Four "I's" in the text and see if the TWINS hit on any of these.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that the amount of advertisements can be a little over powering but i go on that site at least twice a week and if you use ESPN or NFL.com then it's pretty standard. I think that it's basic purpose is that of research and people with inquiries can pretty easily move through the site. The amount of advertisements i imagine is in direct relation to the high cost of the new stadium and the ability to "ride" it's momentum. The fact that the Twins are the hottest team in the MLB does help as well. Go to the Yankees site and i think you'll get the same feel.
ReplyDeleteAll great posts. I agree that it is very cluttered when initially pulling up the site. Once I started to navigate more I found it to be a very functional site to utilize. I was most impressed with how they created strategic alliances with partners such as Chevy but it was not in my face.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that I believe this may be a MLB approved template.
Beyond just physical clutter is, in my opinion, emotional clutter.
ReplyDeleteMarketing Guru, you mentioned the self-running video. To make thing worse, even when one clicks the "Disable Autoplay", the darn thing keeps playing.
In addition, the enormous amount of content being fed into the site slows my browser (Google Chrome for Mac) down considerably. If I actually were a BBall fan, there are a lot of other places to go for scores, stats, etc.
Real busy websites like the Twins looks a lot like a person that has just learned how to use a word processor, lots of fonts interspersed though the text. Website design is real simple, easy to put up but very difficult to make it good.
ReplyDeleteA personal point is I REALLY HATE when the speakers kick in with a blast of sound.
Large bandwidth is needed on this site with all the motion and sound downloading going on, painfull.
I concur this site is filled with a lot of information and the self-running videos are very annoying!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your observations Marketing Guru; if it's not too late I'd like to jump on board the Twins website lack of appreciation society
ReplyDeleteIt's been a while since I last visited a commercial site that appears to have bypassed or at least "skipped by" thorough browser compatibility testing before going "live".
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Twins fan but surely an "undisableable" "Disable Autoplay" button is the marque of a truly inept website.