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Archives for February 2012

Our new website - next steps

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Ben Gallop Ben Gallop | 09:37 UK time, Tuesday, 21 February 2012

It's now nearly three weeks since we relaunched the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport website and I wanted to update you on where we are with this on-going project - including the sorts of issues we are looking at for the next round of changes, based on the feedback we continue to receive.

Before I do that, a word on how we are communicating to you about these changes. Unfortunately it isn't practical to post comments in response to every individual message we receive - so I hope you understand that it makes more sense to provide broader updates like this one on a regular basis. By blogging in this way we are at least able to reach a larger proportion of the audience and can address the widest range of questions and concerns.

And just to avoid any confusion, our other blogs on the relaunch have now been closed to new comments, so the place to have your say on this issue is here. We are also continuing our which allows us to canvas a wider range of opinion - feel free to get involved with that too.

But on to the matter at hand. We have been through a number of major changes since we first launched the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport website, back in 2000. Every time we have done so, it has involved enormous upheaval for everyone and some major design, editorial and technical challenges.

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Live page issues

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Ben Gallop Ben Gallop | 14:15 UK time, Monday, 13 February 2012

I'm sure regular users of the site will have noticed that we are having technical problems with the live text commentary pages.

These became apparent over the weekend and continue to affect our live text pages.

We are hard at work to resolve this, please bear with us while we do so.

In the meantime, Sportsday Live is being published via a page which requires users to hit 'refresh' for updates.

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More on our new website

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Ben Gallop Ben Gallop | 10:28 UK time, Thursday, 9 February 2012

I wanted to give you an update on the launch of the new-look ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport website, and also talk about some more new features we have launched.

First of all it is worth remembering that one of the main reasons for the relaunch was to make the site more dynamic, so that we can better respond to the big stories and events. Yesterday we saw that theory put into practice, initially with Harry Redknapp's acquittal, then later in the day with Fabio Capello's resignation as England manager.

For a sports website, this was the ultimate day for breaking news and our relaunched site - with its front page layout designed to create more of an impact and a live page that pulls in material from across ´óÏó´«Ã½ outlets and the best of our audience interaction - responded in kind. On our old site it was difficult to do stories like this justice - now we have the tools to better capture and reflect the latest news as it happens.

Secondly, I would like to simply reiterate what we said last week when we went live - that this is an on-going process of development. Last Wednesday wasn't the end of the process, it was the start. There is more to come as we continue to enhance our online product in the run-up to a huge summer of sport.

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Changes to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport website

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Ben Gallop Ben Gallop | 06:06 UK time, Wednesday, 1 February 2012

UPDATE: THURSDAY 9 FEB, 1900 GMT.

This entry is now closed to comments. Ben has written a new blog responding to some of the initial feedback. It can be found here.

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UPDATE: FRIDAY 3 FEB, 1722 GMT.
Posting this as a re-comment but also adding here to highlight to new visitors to the blog-

I just want to reassure all commenters, that we are listening to all feedback - from a number of sources not just this blog - and will be collating and assessing to help us inform the decisions we take on how best to fine tune the new-look site.

Far from ignoring feedback, we are reading every comment posted on this blog, and in Cait O Riordan's blog, and really value your feedback, either here or via the survey linked in the original post.

There are some very clear themes that have come through which we will be investigating further - some of the obvious ones being our yellow banners, journeys to football statistics and the formatting of the stats themselves.

Those comments which highlight specific user issues are particularly useful - as I said we are taking in all your comments and assessing but we cannot respond individually to them all.

For those asking about testing, we conducted user testing and other research, for example a survey of 2,000 people, at various stages of the project and will continue to thoroughly test any planned changes before pushing them to live, so hope you can appreciate we won't be making any rushed decisions as the new site beds in and we take a sensible period of time to gauge things properly.

Thanks, Claire

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You will notice that we have begun the process of relaunching the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sport website. Today, February 1 2012, marks the start of a significant piece of work that will see us completely overhaul our online service - the first time we have done so since 2003.

The timing, of course, is no coincidence. We are making these changes to put us in the best shape for one of the busiest years of sport in the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s history, which will culminate in the London Olympics, our biggest event yet.

The changes are in response to audience feedback and research. Clearly a huge amount has happened on the internet since that last re-launch in 2003. Our audience has grown significantly over the years, but the website had not been updated in corresponding fashion.

The changes we are implementing now are significant and go beyond a mere 'lick of paint' - they are designed to give us the tools we need to provide more effective coverage of sport and to get people to the content they want.

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