Last year I opened the site http://www.scores4u.com. I'm still tweaking with validation but that I can manage on my own: what I hope to have from you are comments about its usability and how I could improve it and if you have any suggestions about new functionalities you'd like to see, more sports / championships / cups / tournaments.
Thank you in advance for any honest comment.

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Scores 4 U: sports fixtures and scores

Hi.
I went to your website and firstly looked at all the headings on the home page, expecting to be able to click them, but nothing is clickable. That seemed odd to me. There are dozens of headings for a range of sports and my first thought was that I could click on any of them and be taken to an article or some results related to each of the headings.

For example, theres a heacing for "February 7 2009 - Coppa Italia Women. The semifinals schedule is on line. The update of the final scores will start as soon as they are available" but it doesn't link to a page about "Coppa Italia Women", in fact, it doesn't link at all. I would then have to choose the right section from the top of the page (I chose FIFA Football), then find that competition (which I couldn't)...

That, to me, seems wrong. A usability study would clearly demonstrate that most visitors would expect those headings on the home page to click through to relevant content.

Then there's the empty pages. I clicked the 'FIFA Football' link from the top and the page was virtually empty, the only content on the page was "The most important football championships" so I thought the site was under development so I clicked a different heading, and got "The most important rugby championships". Then I noticed the menu changed depending on what section I clicked on. But it was not obvious.

So, being a football fan, I went back to FIFA Football and clicked the top entry on the left-hand menu "Recent Updates" but nothing happened. I guess there was no 'recent updates'.

The big problems with the site, in my opinion, are:
1. The design looks like a typical 'blog' that should be full of links to articles but it's not.
2. The site makes me wonder what I have to do rather than make it obvious.
3. The site doesn't seem to give me anything that hundreds of existing and established sports sites can't give me.

When in a category, ie "Coppa Italia 2008/2009", I am faced with choosing from drop-down lists. Why not give me some links to click on. Make it obvious. Would you believe there are loads of people out there who want information but don't know what to do when faced with 2 or 3 drop down lists? They want links so give your readers links to the competitions. Give them links to each round with a summary of each round with the link and perhaps at the top of each competition page.

Put some information on each section page rather than leave it blank. And, stop assuming that people will know what to do when they see a blank page. If you want them to see the menu change, give each section a slightly different colour so that the new menu is obvious.

Anyway, there's a few things to think about.

All the best.

Thank you very much for your review. While tweaking with the code I messed up some of the links to the "recent updates" pages.
Concerning the drop-down lists the problem is that the typical championship has more than 30 matchdays so a simple list of links would be quite long, even worse for the NBA, which has games played on an almost daily bases so I'm using a drop-down list for each month. I chose drop-down list also because I saw a lot of sports sites using them so I guessed people are used to them: well maybe I'm wrong.
I'll also see about the blank page when you enter a section and thank you again for your input.

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Scores 4 U: sports fixtures and scores

You're welcome.
On the issue of having so many matchdays, you might want to consider having a link to each matchday and the list of results for that day on it's own page. It would give you loads and loads of pages, yes, but for search engines thats a good thing. Over a period of time you'd end up with a massive site but you could set each list to show a limited number of matchday links per page so you didn't end up with very long pages.

If one of your aims is to get good search engine positioning for your pages, I'd go with the links to pages rather than the drop-downs. Assuming you use some sort of content management system so it wouldn't be hard to do.

All the best.

Site seems too plain once clicking on the tabs.

The most important ______ championships

You should have more on the page than simply that.

On the NFL Football page you can have everything listed except the seasonal stats without making the page too big.

Nobody likes to click and click. They want to find the info now.

Maybe you should try using raw html rather than using the blog script?

You might also try limiting your site to just some of the sports and having more coverage?

Where's baseball?

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what happened?

Martin, search engines are certainly important but I don't want to mess things up and if I had a limited number of matchdays for page I should implement a page system so eventually the risk is to make things more complicated rather than simpler. Consider that I'm not using a CMS as I want to have 100% control over the code: I'm from a "real men use (X)HTML" era.
I'm trying to improve the site's functionality so I'm also looking into your idea about placing links in the "recent updates" section because that means adding something but I'm heavily changing something in the site structure only if I'm getting a big feedback about that.


RJ38, thank you for your feedback.
The structure I used for the NFL championship was basically to use the side menu. OK, I might change that for next championship.
As I wrote to Martin the site uses no CMS, just XHTML+CSS. Concerning the coverage, consider that more coverage requires more time so basically the more I learn to handle the updates (meaning the less time I take to do it...) the more I can cover and that's why I asked for suggestions about other sports / championships / etc.
About baseball it was left out basically because I'm quite ignorant about it so I started with sports I know pretty decently in terms of knowing not just which campionships / cups / etc. are played around the world but also how to structure calendars / schedules and the sites of the various leagues where I can find them and the scores.

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Scores 4 U: sports fixtures and scores

I know what you mean. I used to be in the 'notepad' club and believed in having complete control over everything. Then one day I tried a CMS and realised how much time I was losing on code rather than putting my time into content.

A good CMS (Joomla for example) gives you a massive amount of control over layout (using completely customisable templates) while giving you so much flexibility and search engine friendliness (URLs, Page Titles, Menus etc.,).

The bigger your site gets, the more work involved to make a global change whereas a CMS, all you have to do is change the template and the 'changes' are automatically applied to the whole site - or the section of the site that 'that' template is applied to.

Just a thought. Something you might want to at least take a look at. I can see so much potential for a CMS with what you're doing. You obviously like what you're doing and are really into the sports statistics etc., so getting yourself a CMS would give you more time to work on the interesting content and leave the coding to the template design.

Soooo true! You beat me to it.

First glance at his website, I know right away that it's been manually coded up. A CMS system integrated on the site would help a lot. Don't worry about SE issues, Joomla & even Drupal takes care of that.

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I don't spend much time coding: it took time for the initial development of the site but now I have the templates for the various kinds of schedule to use over and over again so basically it takes time to get the matches data to create the schedules and update them with the results.
I use KompoZer as HTML editor and I can fill up a table with the results in the graphic mode so it's pretty quickly: of course when you have a hundred games it takes time to update all of them so I'm always looking for more efficient ways to do it but I don't know if using a CMS would give me any advantage anyway I'll look into it for a possible future development.

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Scores 4 U: sports fixtures and scores

While I'm working on the suggestions I received I created a Facebook page to increase the site visibility in FB.

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Scores 4 U: sports fixtures and scores