Afternoon gentlemen. I just logged on the sporting life website to place my 'pick 7' and to my disappointment have ound that it has changed. How long has it been like this? Do you chaps like it I miss not being able to look at the fastcards or a day in advance, I must admit.
Don't use it but will pop over for a look. Maybe it's the same designer that re-designed the Racing Post web site. Don't like that at all. Also don't like the idea of paying for things that used to be free. I mainly use the ATR site now and only go to RP when I need to know the times taken in races relative to standard.
Changed yesterday. You can still look at future days cards. When you click on Racecards, there's a sky blue banner with the future dates on them. It's actually the font on the racecard page that's really annoying me - hard to tell between a 3 and a 5 sometimes.
I can see that Bill, but it was easier to use the fastcards. They don't seem to be showing on the new site now - unless I have just totally missed them. Also reading the form isn't that clear anymore either.
It's harder to navigate from the fast results back to the racecards too. Always been my go to site and I'm usually cool with change but it's really annoying - also, racecards used to fit nicely on one screen and now you need to scroll quite a bit to get through their big graphical silks.
You only have to click on the News tab Maestro Can't see index of runners anywhere though. Maybe I'm blind. Other things I use RP for are quickly drilling down on pedigrees (but I tend to use Pedigree Query site for pedigrees) and index of runners for future days racing (handy for running competitions) and to see which races are on terrestrial TV
Well, I can't see me being converted to SL based on what I've seen. Still, never been attracted to it as I was a big Sporting Chronicle fan until SL took it over. Never did like SL after that.
Changed yesterday and I think it's crap. Will get my head around it at some point or will go back to the old days and buy a newspaper.
You absolute ****ing star Doalittle I commented on yesterday's DT how crap the new site is, such a pleasure to see this and get back to the old format - many thanks
Why do they do this? Who designs these sites? On what basis are the changes made and who (if anyone) checks out the L&F before the crap is launched. Beats me how they can spend money making it worse for the reader. Why don't they put out a couple of test sites to invited reviewers and get feed back before they finalise the design and launch. Wouldn't be that difficult. Or even ask for feed back on the current site and then issue a list of potential changes with a "On a scale of 1-10 would this be better or worse than the current" inviting open comment as well.
Having said that the ATR did ask for feedback and never once acknowledged mine, or my criticism of the fact that they never acknowledged my feedback. Bastards. At least Timeform always reply when I write to them.
To be fair to Sporting Life they launched the new site as a "beta" and did invite feedback. I just found it completely useless for reading racecards and form. Here is what I am used to from the old site - nice and compact, click on each horse for its form: The new site tries to pack too much info on the initial racecard view IMHO (although can perhaps be customised - haven't checked that yet):
Its not a coincidence that ATR, RP and now SL have all come out with new websites, their old ones while perfectly usable on desktop had become outdated. The designs of all 3 are now in keeping with the modern standard of responsive design which is the most widely accepted solution to catering for mobile and desktop users, the only other solution is to run 2 separate websites really. They use a responsive grid layout thats just a bunch of rows and columns which react to the size of the viewport. If you resize your browser while on the new sites you will see the layout respond by displaying the mobile nav menu, changing text/image size and stacking columns to make it look good at whatever size. If you do the same on the old sites you will see the website disappear. Mobile has long since taken over desktop in terms of number of users and internet traffic, and its only becoming more and more dominant. Everyone has to deal with it and our racing sites have actually been able to wait longer than most to conform because they are mainly for form study and no one wants to do that on a mobile. Can only assume now that even their traffic figures are starting to be dominated by mobile. I think RP and SL have done a much better job than ATR which is too cluttered for my liking and I think most people will get used to them just fine.
I appreciate that Joe. And I also agree that the ATR site has got worse. I think, when you have got used to finding what you want easily and quickly, it becomes a pain when a newly designed web site makes it more difficult. I hate Windows 10. I hate Word when it thinks it knows what you want to do, but doesn't - very frustrating. Things were easier with the old MS Access 2002/3 than the 2016 version. I'm just not sure what they are thinking with these advanced designs. I understand having to modernise them for the changing world but making it more difficult to find things is rather annoying. Maybe it's my age Maybe it's my age.
