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.

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.