If you follow me on twitter, you know that this work has been a long time coming. Starting last summer, Adam Wodon, Adam Darowski, and I started throwing around ideas for a more mobile-friendly version of our sites. Our mobile experience is probably charitably described as limited and functional and with now over 2/3rd's of our visits coming from handheld devices, we clearly needed to up our game there.

This led to complete review of what we have on our sites and how we present that data on desktop and how we can make that usable on a small screen. It's not easy and after months of design, user testing and work, we have an approach that we believe will serve both desktop and mobile users better than they are now. This is the first in a series of posts we'll publish about our redesign.



We had a number of primary goals in mind when starting the redesign.

Dramatically better mobile experience. Improve internal navigation for each page's sub-pages. Each player, team and league now have a clearly set out single navigation bar in the middle their page. Create a consistent appearance and interaction across all of the sites. Improve the usability and look of our desktop pages while also keeping all of the functionality you rely upon.

Other items that will change.

We've updated our logos to be a bit less web 2.0. We rewrote all of our javascript to not use a framework which should improve load times, an imperative on mobile. We've implemented a site-wide template system which after an initial incorporation should increase the speed we can get work done on the sites. We are shuttering our page sponsorship system. We are shuttering our player and team Elo raters.

Screenshots and Live Site

Hockey-Reference.com is now in a fully functional responsive site hockey-reference.com as we tie up the final loose ends on the site redesign for some of the other sites as well.

Old and New Mobile appearance

Old and New Desktop Appearance

Launch timelines

Hockey-Reference, Done

Pro-Football Reference, Done

Basketball-Reference, Done

College Football, Done

College Basketball, September

Baseball-Reference, October or November

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 10th, 2016 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Announcement, Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, CBB at Sports Reference, CFB at Sports Reference, Hockey-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.