Redesigning our sports bar listings

Fanroom has had a bit of a design refresh (you know, not really a redesign but a bit of an update). It's been focussing on the visual layer, as so far whilst what we've had has looked solid, it's not been that refined or subtle.

The main thing to notice is across the site we've now got a dark bar under the green one in the header. This is primarily to contain the search box, which previously just sat on the right, against the white background, looking all lost and forgotten. Now attention is drawn to it by the background, the fact it is bigger and our slogan being next to it. It's handy when Where will you watch the match? doubles as a slogan and a call to action.

This has helped clear up what was previously a bit of a messy area and make the content of the page a bit clearer. You know what also makes the page content clearer? A shadow in the background. Really makes it pop, that does.

The other main thing to get a new look is the 'Nearby venues' area on the sports bar venue page, which becomes more of a module (and will soon feature the dropdown to enable you to pick any area). This header is now a bit smaller and less 'shouty' and this style applies to the 'Fan reviews' header too – as they're both sub-sections of the main content.

Other than that, the footer has had a touch up (it's all about the 1px lines rather than 3px) and everything just feels that bit more polished. More changes and improvements are constantly happening on the site with new functionality and venues being added on a weekly basis. However in terms of design, the next big thing to get looked at will be the homepage and boy, do we have some ideas for that?

Yes, yes we do.

Other sites listing sports pubs

We're not the only ones doing this, we're not even the first but we think we are doing it differently and better than everyone else (well of course we would). Here in the spirit of openness, we take you through the 'rivals' to our site and let you know the alternatives:

sportspubs.co.uk
Pros: Well they've got the name. They've also been very thorough in writing nice descriptions, explaining exactly the screen setup in the venue and including lots of nice categories like 'team bias' and 'special promotions'. The beauty is in the detail…
Cons: …because it certainly isn't in the visuals. It's pretty ugly, looking like it was designed in the 90s with an aggressive black background. It does warn you that the landlords maintain the page content and it may be out of date, which turns out to be an understatement as a large portion of the venues listed are now closed or have changed names. Pretty sure no-one has updated this since mid 2010 at the latest. However due to the name and the perpetual cycle of reaching the top of Google, it's still number one, even though it's becoming increasingly useless.
How many venues: 230 or so

pubfinder.sky.com
Pros: Being Sky they can obviously tell you what's upcoming on their sports channels, including which is in 3D. Other than that, erm, it's very simple.
Cons: It's not really a site is it? More a little add-on to the Sky site. All you do is enter a search, which is an OK principle in itself but you have to use your postcode - fine if you're looking for somewhere near home or a postcode you know, useless if you're looking for an area you don't know that well. Which, let's face it, is probably why you'd use such a site. Also the listings are uber-basic, they don't even let you copy/paste the address or phone number. Also shows no sign of being updated regularly.
How many venues: not sure

citypublife.co.uk
Pros: They list all upcoming games in all sports of sports (even if they don't make it pretty to look at). They do tell you how many screens and what channels it has.
Cons: A horribly hard-to-read list of upcoming games; a bizarre selection of clipart images to represent each sport, all different sizes and including what seems to be a lads mag model for boxing; the fact you have to go through endless screens of results, selecting your sport, the game you want, then the pub, which all look the same. Apparently there's 27 pubs in the WHOLE of London showing something as big as the Manchester United v Liverpool game – and we all know there's more plastic fans than that. Then when you reach a page it continues it's ugly listings approach and greets you with a massive paragraph of description text. It's a great big mess - seriously, who chooses beige for a sport site?
How many venues: around 50?

livesportsbars.tv
Pros: Now this seems more like it, a bit of design applied for the first time. It's clunky in places but they've got a nice set of icons and are listing all sorts of obscure sporting events. The venue pages are incredible thorough: showing several pictures, map, opening times, channels, a long discription, features and forthcoming games they'll be playing.
Cons: Again, however, they make you pick a game before you can search for a venue: admirable if they're truly telling you where will definitely show that match but an annoying process for repeat users. Whilst they have a nice description of the place, it's pretty much just sales blurb from the bar itself, so no 'real' knowledge (something that is lacking from all but our site...). Also the fact a bar has to sign up to feature on there means you're again not getting the full picture.
How many venues: 70 or so

matchpint.co.uk

Pros: Great name, in fact we only found out about this as we were going to use this name. They're the only ones to really try and create a sporting theme, which is admirable. The venue page designs follow livesportsbars.tv in having lots of info and icons.

Cons: The visual design is very clunky though and a bit aggressive, including an annoying yellow card that follows you as you scroll. There's a complete lack of venues, which renders it a bit pointless. They aren't very SEO optimised so you won't find them on any search engines, meaning again, flawed.

How many venues: about 60 (though this includes test venues and some duplication so... confusing)

In conclusion: our site for showing sports bars is clearly the best, what with it being built around actual user-reviews and having over 400 locations and counting. But you probably could have guessed we'd say that. So if you think there's something we've missed about the others do get in touch...

New page for contributing sports bars

We've redesigned our 'contribute' page on our site that lists sports bars in London – other people might call it 'add a venue' or 'upload' or something but we like to be different. We also like to think of our users contributing to the online community.

Originally we had quite a long form that required lots of information from the user and reflected our internal structure too much. After realising that we have to do a bit of work on every venue anyway (getting an accurate lat/lon, sourcing a photo etc) and we were often checking the validity of places ourselves, we figured things could be a lot simpler for the user. After all, you don't want to be looking for the phone number of a bar when you were just trying to give us a recommendation.

Along with simplifying the amount of information required, we also changed one of the fields. We originally had one called 'description' which was kind of a hangover from when we were going to have some descriptive text about each venue before we decided to focus exclusively on user reviews. Much better to turn this into a field for a review of the venue... as it makes sense to capture a review from someone at the same time because if they're adding it, they're likely to have been there.

So it's just the five steps now and here's more or less what the new design looks like:

You can only see it if you're logged into the site but we'd certainly love feedback on how well it's working, so do sign up (unless you're a bot, in which case don't). It takes literally 30 seconds...


Originally posted on Tumblr on 30th September 2011.