brandondawson.org Drupal Website Developer and Consultant

Mike Davidson on ESPN’s Redesign

Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson knows design, and he particularly understands the design needs of ESPN: he was on the team that built ESPN's last major website revision. Here's his thoughts (link):

Some parts I found worth highlighting:

First the standard caveat: designing a major media site is not as easy as it may appear. It is not like designing a blog and not like designing a standard “web presence” for a company. There are hundreds of internal stakeholders to answer to, millions of daily users to please, and a ton of legacy and third-party code that is often outside your control. Anyone who tries to knock down the virtues of a major media site redesign based on how far it falls short of perfection is making the wrong comparison. The most important benchmark to grade is simply the amount of improvement (or worsening) from the last iteration of the site. Secondarily, comparison against competitors is also very important.

He goes on to add:

The new redesign gracefully chisels away a lot of the visual clutter and presents a calmer, gentler ESPN for your perusing pleasure. Gone is the autoplay video and other visual cruft that had built up over the years.

Note: When I refer to “visual cruft”, this is a phenomenon that happens to every content site over time. Essentially, you redesign and everything’s perfect, and then “plaque” kind of builds up over time in the form of code and design elements that are inserted to meet editorial or business needs. Each redesign is an opportunity to chisel off the plaque and start anew.

And then he launches into a brief riposte against "Standards Nazis" (my words, not his):

Don’t even bother trying to run the ESPN front page through the stupid W3C validator because that’s a lousy way to judge code quality. The tomato-throwers among us will of course do this immediately and point to the hundreds of validation errors as evidence of incompetence. The more seasoned among us know that 500 ampersand-related errors are meaningless in the grand scheme of things and we wish the validator could be configured to selectively mute certain types of benign errors.

All in all, it's a great brief read on some of the challenges inherent to building a website for any large organization, and doubly so a large media organization.