SBNation Goes National

by Sky Kalkman on Sep 9, 2009 11:09 PM EDT in Site News

The great thing about all the SB Nation blogs is that you can get frequent, in-depth coverage on all your favorite teams. The downside has always been that you needed to check out 30 baseball sites in order to get news on all 30 teams. Or go to ESPN.com.

Not any more. SB Nation just launched an effort to provide one-stop shopping. Whether you're someone who only has the time to check sports news for a few minutes a day (I'm so sorry for you) or you're like me and can never get enough sports news, the new sbnation.com has you covered. Only want baseball news? Try sbnation.com/mlb.

There will be much more to come about why these new front pages have been created and what's so cool about them, but I'll lead off with two. First, from Tyler Bleszinski, SBNation founder:

SBNation.com will seek to do on a national level what each SB Nation network blog already does for its team or sport: provide the most timely, engaging and highest quality fan perspective information and conversation on the web.

Second, from me, because you're sure to wonder, what the hell's a "story stream". Well, a story stream is a series of related articles and editorial commentary covering the same topic. For example, coverage of the Roy Halladay trade rumors would be given its own story stream. As sites from SB Nation and around the web wrote about Roy Halladay, those articles would be added to the ones already written, updating the stream of news on the topic. Quotes, analysis, fan reaction, and other types of articles would all be housed on one page. On nice advantage of this route is that you can subscribe to a stream's RSS feed or bookmark the story stream page to keep up with the latest news on a hot topic. Or click through and start discussing each article at its original location.

What do you think?

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It looks ok, but the left column (From our Editors) has too much text

Is there a reason they got this up and running on 9/9/09?

MLB Notebook / StatSpeak / Baseball Daily Digest / Inside the Majors

by Zach Sanders on Sep 9, 2009 11:52 PM EDT reply actions

Yeah, their design is a little...quirky.

My eyes are naturally drawn to the incredibly large “World Cup Qualifying: Several Nations Earn Huge Wins; Argentina Not So Much” headline. This either needs to be on the far left (where most English readers’ eyes naturally rest), or…on the far left.

I think the Editors column (as you mentioned) is cluttered as well. All-caps headlines are…not reader-friendly, particularly on the Internet. The lack of font change between title (which appears to be the same size as the content, and just bolded) and the article content adds to the confusion.

As for my thoughts:

The headline section could take up the entire width of the top. If you have to break it up, put the “From Our Editors” section on the right, and the SBN blog list on the left (which is where links almost always go anyway). I like the other, smaller headlines, but there has to be a better way to organize them than simply adding them beneath the main headline. I dislike the way ESPN handles this with its rotating top headline banner, but…there has to be an alternative.

Overall, there is just way too much information on the main page, and it isn’t separated out well enough. I love the look and feel of the top portion with the scores clearly separated from the rest of the news — this distinguishes them extremely well. The technical writer in me hates seeing the SB Nation logo centered above the news feed.

I get the feeling that the designers wanted to try something different so the front page would stand apart from most other news sites. This is a good idea in some instances because ESPN is just one gigantic cluster of information overload (although it’s gotten better), but some design advents came around because they work.

by jwiscarson on Sep 10, 2009 2:27 AM EDT up reply actions