New Mobile-Friendly Site Launches Tomorrow (Tue 9/1)

Update Tuesday 9/1 10:42 am ET: Our mobile-friendly site is now live! Enjoy. It’s sure to have at least a few issues we’ll need to fix, so if you see anything that looks off, please email us at support@teamrankings.com.

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Before football season starts each year, we typically recap what we did over the summer, kind of like what you used to do for your fourth grade teacher on the first day of school.

Here’s our later-than-usual 2015 version, with some very important news for all of our users.

Sadly, we didn’t spend our entire summer eating hot dogs and riding the Turkish Twist at Canobie Lake Park. Instead, we’ve been working on a big project we’re finally ready to launch.

TeamRankings.com Will Be Mobile-Friendly

This summer we went all-in to accomplish a singular goal, which was to make TeamRankings.com work way better on mobile phones. We did this for a few reasons:

  1. Apparently smartphones are all the rage. Traffic to our site from mobile phones and tablets is now roughly equal to traffic from desktop computers, and phone traffic is growing. Meanwhile, the number of visits we get from regular ole’ computers has been relatively flat over the past 12 months.
  2. The current user experience on phones is pretty bad. Our last major site design overhaul was way back in 2010, and smartphone usage didn’t factor into our design decisions at all. So until this week, the magic words for using TeamRankings on mobile devices were “pinch and zoom” on pretty much every page. That gets old quickly.
  3. Our friends at Google pretty much forced our hand. In April this year Google’s search engine algorithm began penalizing sites that it deems to be not mobile-friendly. Since we don’t have a big marketing budget, ranking highly on Google for popular sports related search terms is very important to us.

Roll it all together, and it was finally time to redesign TeamRankings.com to offer a much better experience on phones.

Launch Date: Tuesday, September 1, 2015

We’re planning to push this out the first version of our mobile-friendly design tomorrow.

Once the site redesign goes live and looks stable, we’ll send out an email to all our registered users announcing it, and put a note on the home page.

The site will likely need to go offline for up to 20-30 minutes while we implement the update.

Our Solution: Still One Site, But Mobile-Friendly

We’re updating our existing web site to use what’s called “responsive design.”

With responsive design, you don’t need to do anything differently to use TeamRankings.com on a phone. Just navigate to the site using your phone’s web browser as usual, and the site will automatically adjust content and navigation to look better on the smaller screen.

(What we aren’t doing is building a separate mobile site or releasing TeamRankings apps for iOS or Android devices, which we felt might put too much of a maintenance burden on our talented but small engineering team. However, we may release a mobile app in the future.)

How Will The Updated Site Benefit Me?

When it comes to critiquing web sites, everybody has their opinions, and you’ll surely come to your own conclusion based on your experience with our updated site. But in short:

  • If you access TeamRankings.com from a mobile phone, or if you looked at the site on a phone in the past and decided it was way too difficult to use, then we hope you’re a lot happier after we launch this update.
  • If you only access the site from a computer, then you’ll still be able to use just about everything you did previously. However, you will need to spend a bit of time adjusting to a few changes, because things you expect to see may have moved around a bit. Bear with us, though. We’re confident the adjustment period will be quick, and that you’ll consider the end result an improvement.

What’s Going To Change Exactly?

Almost everything on the site is going to look at least slightly different, so be prepared.

Here’s a brief summary:

  • Changes to top navigation bar on desktop screens. When you use the site on your computer, you’ll notice that the top navigation bar and associated drop-down menus have been tweaked — nothing huge, but the available links and link order have changed a bit.
  • Changes to left side navigation menu on desktop screens. On larger screens, you’ll still use a left-side navigation menu to get around each specific sport, but we’ve organized sport navigation into a small number of categories, and moved some of the lower-level navigation options (e.g. switching from one specific NFL team stat page to another) into the main part of each page.
  • New mobile navigation menu. When you use the site on your phone, or if you greatly reduce the size of your browser window on your computer, you will no longer see a left-side navigation menu at all. Instead, there will be a “Menu” icon and link in the top left of your screen, which spawns a comprehensive site menu that you can call up at any time. And again, there will be more navigation-purposed links (e.g. to go from one team or matchup page to another) located directly on pages now.
  • New responsive layouts for almost all pages. Almost every page (picks, rankings, stats, matchups, teams, etc.) is going to look at least slightly differently than before. On phones, a lot of the content that used to exist in the rightmost column of the site (e.g. links to view other related pages) has been collapsed and moved into the main area of the page.
  • New approaches to data tables on small screens. On smaller screens, data tables will now load to fill up the full width of the screen, so they will not require zooming to read. Some larger tables, though, may now require scrolling to the right to view all the columns they contain. In addition, we’ve done some code surgery to remove javascript from many of our tables, which is good news for people who want to scrape data from our site.
  • Some minor changes to page content/data. On a few pages, we altered or removed data that we didn’t feel was adding a lot of value to users, or that had been generating a lot of user questions. The confusing colored dots on our matchup page team stats comparisons were one example.
  • A few pages de-emphasized or removed. To simplify site navigation, a few of our less popular pages, such as scores pages and player pages, have been de-prioritized or removed from the navigation structure, for now at least. (You can still get to player pages from the player stats pages included in every team section.)
  • Minor visual design upgrades. Putting in place a slicker graphic design was not the goal of our summer work, so don’t expect anything fancy. However, we’ve made a couple updates here and there, such as our home page and our information pages for our pool picks products. Until we invest more time in improving graphic design, we just want the site to be simple, clean, and easy to read. Font sizes have increased, and our sporadic use of green links has been abandoned for consistent use of the more familiar blue.

What’s Not Going To Change?

  • The pool picks sections. The pages within our 4 pool picks products (Football Pick’em Picks, NFL Survivor Picks, Bowl Pick’em Picks, and NCAA Bracket Picks) that require a paid subscription to access have not been touched in this first mobile-friendly design iteration. These tools contain some complex and/or data-intensive pages that aren’t easily translated to small screens. So for the 2015 football season, the experience of getting our picks for pick’em and survivor pools will look the same to subscribers who have used those products over the last couple of seasons.

What Made This Such A Big Project?

Ideally we would have released a mobile-friendly site, or an app, or something that looked decent on a phone, several years ago. But limited resources force tough choices.

Summer is typically our one window each year to take on bigger and more audacious site improvement projects, especially if they involve extensive new engineering work.

During the summers of 2013 and 2014, we decided to focus primarily on building up our new football office pool tools. Those products have played an important role in providing value to our subscribers.

This redesign project, though, was a pretty massive undertaking that demanded our full attention, so it took until this summer to carve out the appropriate time. Consider the following:

  • Our site is huge. We publish thousands and thousands of pages of dynamically updated content, with dozens of different page layouts used. Every single unique page layout needed to be evaluated and adjusted to look good (or at least halfway decent, in some cases) on both large and small screens.
  • Our site is old. There are pages on our current site that run off code originally written as far back as 2007, or 8 years ago. That’s like 137 years ago in web technology years. So in engineering parlance, we had a lot of “technical debt” to grapple with.
  • Our site is deep. A lot of mobile sites only offer a simple, one- or two-level navigation menu. That doesn’t work for us. For example, we have 100+ team stats pages for five different sports, each of which is part of a category, which is part of a team stats section, which is part of a general stats section, which is part of a sport section. You get the picture. It took us over a month just to design and prototype some initial options for handling site navigation on a phone.
  • Our site is data-intensive. How in the world do you make a 351-row, 10-column, sortable, filterable table of data look and work great on a tiny screen? We definitely haven’t cracked that nut yet, but we think we’ve taken the first steps in the right direction.

All told, we’ve been working on this project since April, including bringing on a few design consultants to help us plan and execute it.

After a final sprint in recent weeks, we’re getting it launched just in time for football season, yet it still only represents the very first phase of our evolution toward providing a top-notch mobile user experience.

What Else Did You Do This Summer?

It was a tough decision, but we had to put off almost all of our other site/product improvement ideas to get the mobile-friendly redesign done. But we did make progress and investments in a few other areas:

  • We brought on additional help with customer support, operations, and marketing
  • We moved the entire site over to HTTPS, which adds additional security
  • We made improvements to systems and process that will generally help us move faster

Once we’re over the hump of launching this first mobile-friendly site update and fixing any high-priority post-launch bugs (there are bound to be some with a project this complex), we’ll go back to the drawing board to prioritize our next development projects.

In Closing…

Every significant site redesign project impacts existing users, and this one will be no different. Many of our most loyal users have gotten used to our trusty old site design by now, especially since we haven’t changed the basic look of the site in years. (It was starting to look pretty “vintage” recently, that’s for sure.)

However, as a wise man once said, the times they are a-changin’. In the long run, delivering a good experience on TeamRankings.com across all types of devices should provide a lot of benefits for users, and we think it’s worth a bit of short-term re-learning cost for some.

We understand that change takes some getting used to, though. We will be listening very closely to feedback and continuing to improve the site in the days and weeks ahead.

Just keep in mind that the first iteration of our mobile-friendly site will be far from perfect. Expect that, and please, help us make it better by sharing your thoughts (see below).

Catch A Bug? Have Some Feedback?

If something on the new site looks broken to you, or you just want to comment on the design updates, please alert us as soon as you can by emailing support@teamrankings.com.

We’ll prioritize identified issues and fix the important stuff as quickly as we can.