Improving Presentation at Carolinahurricanes.com
Assignment
Choose a Web site you visit regularly, one where you read a lot of the content. You have been hired as the site’s editor-in-chief. Make specific recommendations to improve the presentation, integrating this week’s module. What elements or features promote consumption of the site (again, think of all the elements described in this module)? How are graphics and visuals incorporated in the site and do they encourage or discourage use of the site? How? Post critique to your course blog.
Site target
Official website of the NHL Carolina Hurricanes hockey club: http://www.carolinahurricanes.com/
Resources
Lynch and Horton’s Web Style Guide 2 (2001) makes numerous suggestions to achieve success in building a website. Nathan Wallace’s Web Writing for Many Interest Levels (1999) also has useful tips, as does the Course Book for JoMC 711. Fagerjord’s “Rhetorical Convergence; Studying Web Media” (2003) helps us analyze the uses of different media in a website. I have compared the official website of the NHL Stanley Cup Champion Carolina Hurricanes hockey club against many of those tips to see if the website is also of championship calibre.
Use and Integration of Multimedia
Carolinahurricanes.com does not make extensive use of graphics and visuals in a manner to most effectively promote use of the site. This lack of promotion is in spite of extensive video archives on the site. Still photo archives are less extensive. Multimedia on the site is NOT transparent to the user.
The index page customarily has one or two photographs, normally a still of the most recent game, or a lookahead to the next game with a photo of a previous game between the two teams. Front page stories often have a small graphic at the left fronting a one sentence or one paragraph intro, but the graphics themselves are not links to the live stories as is true in many other sites. The link is in the text. The one sentence or one paragraph intros, suggested by Web Style Guide 2 as a feature, are well written and allow the interested reader to jump to the story if interested in more detail. Permanent graphics (such as pictures of the broadcasters) are live links, and offer ties to team broadcasters Chuck Kaiton, John Forslund, and Tripp Tracy’s blogs. Those broadcasters are team employees.
Coverage of the most recent game has highlight video and a nicely presented photo gallery, but to get to the archived game video and multimedia, one must follow an intricate path down four levels, hardly intuitive. Users who want to find game video or archived interviews with current players or legends find a difficult task. On the right menu bar there is a Multimedia link, going Multimedia>Canesvision>Historical vault>Game night archive.
There is an easier way to the video, a link at the very bottom of the index page. It is the last entry under a subheader “Last five games”, to the “hurricanes.com vault,” which enables the user to get to the historical vault of game videos with one less click. I’m puzzled why this link should be under “last five games”.
On the right menu bar, the link “.com vault” also takes the user directly to ”Historical vault”, but the user is unlikely to look for that shortcut since the name does not suggest the content. Even at those lower levels, there is little consistency. Some games are simply links to nhl.com stories, with more stats but less multimedia. Some links take the user to entertaining in-house videos shown on the jumbotron at that particular game.
Consideration should be given to higher profile featuring of the videos, photos, and audio. There needs to be a page concentrating on how to access the multimedia, what content is available, and how far back the archives go. The team has a heavy investment here, since the radio and TV broadcasters are team employees, hardly a reason to hide their work product in such a disorganized fashion. Multimedia needs to be more transperent to the user.
Technical Recommendations
Next, some technical recommendations based on suggestions in Web Style Guide 2:
1) Informative headers and footers to help users printing out pages from the site identify where they came from. The site appears to have neither headers or footers. Inclusion of headers and footers will assist users printing pages identify the document source.
2) Show the creator of the page is useful to enhance credibility of the site, and to allow feedback. Six pages were selected at random, two press releases (one the most recent on the site, the second being the oldest on the site), a player bio, the club employee directory, the current season schedule, and a major section index page. While the press releases showed the name of the author (with no individual contact information), none of the other pages indicated the creator. Source code was examined, 215 printed pages in all for the six pages studied. Consistently indicating the page creator will enhance site credibility and enable user feedback.
3) Each page should have a title (ususally embedded in the HTML coding), which is especially useful if the user prints a page with title on, bookmarks the page, or enters the page directly rather than through the index page. The site is inconsistent on its treatment of page titles. While the pages for individual players on the under Team>Roster are titled with the name of the player, jumping to the voluminous press release archive at News>Storm Center News just shows a generic “Carolina Hurricanes – News Page” as the title for every entry. Having a page title will assist users bookmarking the site, as well as those entering directly from a search engine or other link to a sub-page.
4) Include page dates to help the user see how frequently the site is updated, and how fresh is the information. The same six pages examined under “creator” above were examined examined for page dates. None of the pages had dates embedded in the source code, nor at the bottom of the page. Only one of the two press releases was dated, with the earliest one appears to be from 1999 as it mentions Hurricanes Floyd having caused cancellation of a preseason game. I also looked at the contests and sweepstakes page, and noted that the Play with the Canes promotion from Winter 2005 would be returning in Winter 2006. (since we are already six months past the end of that winter, I can presume it did not return). Lack of page dates reduce the credibility of information. Sports users are especially interested in current information, or the date of revision of archived or historical information.
5) Have the homepage URL appear on each page on the site to assist the user in keeping track of location. Except in the body of a few pages, the index page URL http://www.carolinahurricanes.com never appears on the site. it should consistently appear on each page. While the top of each page does have a Hurricane logo that consistently returns the user to the index page, this is not a good substitute.
6) As suggested by accessibity guides, use “ALT” tags in HTML on images to allow those without graphics (or who have turned off graphics because of slow download time or other reasons) to view the name of the image. The index page at http://www.carolinahurricanes.com has ALT tags on just 2 of the 19 images, caniacworld at http://www.carolinahurricanes.com/canesworld/default.asp has 2 of 11, and the image gallery appears have no graphics tagged. ALT tags should be added to each image.
7) Have consistent and predictable navigation, including going back and going to the previous page. Navigation aides on the carolinahurricanes.com are quite predictible, nine major menu choices just below the team logos at the top of each page, with java-based pulldowns in most broswers, and when one of the major menus is selected, what had been the drop down menu appears as menu choices on the left of each page. The back browser button works throughout the site. The only part of the site that appears to have internal back-and-forth navigation is Storm Center News at http://www.carolinahurricanes.com/news/news.asp That site has arrows for the previous and next page, bu no overall index or table of contents, and only the URL for the most recent news release at http://www.carolinahurricanes.com/news/news.asp?articleid=1606 gives the user warning that there are 1606 releases on the site to go back through (actually there are just 1600 as the first six have been scrubbed. Additional navigation needs to be added to the press release archive.
Conclusion
http://www.carolinahurricanes.com contains extensive text and multimedia content. The content is neither organized nor presented in a way the encourage use of the multimedia. Other website presentation does not conform to generally used style guides. Significant improvement can be made.
