Ask HN: How can we improve our website?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5941495

by weston • 13 years ago

3 10 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi, my name is Weston and we've built a sports news site called http://swarmsports.com. We're looking for feedback from the HN community in how we can grow our startup to make it successful.

We're showing users the most viral sports news articles every day.

Even if you're not a sports fan, any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks!

weston5• 13 years ago

Clickable: http://swarmsports.com

spangborn• 13 years ago

Hire a designer - the UI and UX could use some work. Here's some of the design feedback I'd give you:

- You're not utilizing the whole width of the page, and the table looks pretty compressed, making it difficult to read.

- You're also not using the whole height of the page. The pagination would be more useful if there was more content. It's silly to waste that much real estate.

- The icons in the top right are too small and the third (mailing list) carries no meaning.

- Your logo in the navbar is too small, or at least the text. You probably don't need the text in the logo if you've got the heading there.

- Search is in a pretty unintuitive location - try putting it in the top right of the layout.

Edit: From a functional perspective, you've got duplicated stories on the home page currently. Same exact link, two different titles.

weston5• 13 years ago

Wow, thank you! This is very good feedback. :-)

I agree with everything you've said so far. Also, every once and a while a dupe article slips through (ex: same URL, different title like you saw). We do our best to keep an eye out in case something slips through our dupe-detectors.

Thanks again!

simantel• 13 years ago

I'd just like to add that you should probably include some images in your site. It'd certainly spruce things up a bit. Check out the new Digg (http://digg.com/) for an example of a super slick news aggregator site that's very image-heavy.

RexDixon• 13 years ago

Hey there,

I agree. Great feedback. Much appreciated.

meerita• 13 years ago

My suggestions:

Using bootstrap or another UI Framework would surely improve many things, from the UX/UI side. At least it will help until a pro UX can work on it a lot more.

Bootstrapping also will make you code better since the foundation of the code is well done. It also works on mobile and it's easy to catch up as well to tell other developers to manage our codebase, bootstrap has good documentation online and you can do, practically, almost all kind of UI compositions with JS.

After that, I would follow Google Pagespeed recomendations to reach the 100 points and have something like my blog wich loads in 300ms-500ms.

weston5• 13 years ago

Very good feedback, we'll take a look at Google Pagespeeed. Thanks!

LarryMade2• 13 years ago

Flipping throough it...

From using chrome on the desktop it seems like the nav part is responsive but the list isn't (the columns don't shrink accordingly nor the fonts reduce.)

I'd code it so on page 1/landing page you have the text "Viral Sports Articles" on a line below nav and remove that bit from the nav bar, on subsequent pages it doesn't need to be there. Loose the text on the logo if it doesn't have to be there so you can make the logo bigger at such a small scale.

Viral rank doesn't make much sense to me (thinking as Joe Sixpack here)... numbers don't have much meaning maybe a call it "buzz rank" or something and use color bar graphic, long and green for top, and the varying length/color according to whatever the rank metric is.

So description is your categories... Maybe logo/sport symbols to have a quick id?

Seems a little stuffy - all two colors... oh... bee colors... would have noticed that if the logo was bigger.

Maybe a bit more sporty? One of the funnest pictures I've ever saw for a team of programmers was for pro-line software http://www.pcmuseum.ca/icons/ProLineteam.jpg though it wasn't sports software, it was definitely a memorable picture. Kick up your about with "the SwarmSports Team" along with some sports analogies might add to the retention factor.

The blog header is really really nice compared - smiled when I saw it - Id replicate it on the about and possibly on the first page of results. same with the social icons. Blog has no back to content menu...

Space is expensive on phones shorten the date to mm/dd or mm/dd/yy or something like "last Wed." then mm/dd after one week before...

I can't comment on how good the quality of CSS is and stuff, I'm still getting a hang of it myself. My project has some similarities to what you are doing - might check it out to give you some ideas: http://www.doplaces.com

Hope that helps.

weston5• 13 years ago

Very, very helpful! Thank you very much!

Ask HN: How can we improve our website?

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