So, not sure how many of you have noticed, but hokiesports.com has been going through some subtle design changes for a while now. Well, sometime during the summer, they made a fairly substantial change, which brought the overall site design much closer to what seems to be the "industry standard" for college athletics websites. This is great, except for the fact that there are a number of functional changes that make it harder or impossible to navigate.
For example, on the schedule page, if you click on the name of one of our opponents you are taken to their athletics home page, which is kinda neat. The problem is, this used to link to "www.hokiesports.com/football/opponents/[team]", which showed the matchup history with that opponent, a feature that I have found quite useful over the years. You can still access these matchup histories by looking through the "additional links" list, but it's a bit cumbersome to use.
Now, the worse part. See, before the redesign, the Opponent History page used to look like this. There were links to the season schedule for each matchup, and more importantly a link to the box score if it was a game in either the Beamer or Fuente era. Now, it's just a simple table without links at all. Meaning (for example) no straightforward way to look through box scores for a given opponent to figure out which player performed which great play in which year.
Does anyone know the best way to provide constructive criticism on these changes, so that they might decide to roll some of them back? Even better, does anybody know the individual(s) who are in charge of the website, or know someone who might?
Comments
Tweet your displeasure to recruits. That should do it.
I don't like how I can't just add the year at the end of the URL to get the past schedules.
Also, clicking on the opponent in the current schedule takes you to their website instead of the series history.
I think over the last decade we've had the best athletic site of any ACC school. We've also been one of few schools who had the site designed and developed internally instead of outsourcing it for a cookie cutter athletic site. The recent redesign was the first time that it was actually outsourced.
If you have suggestions for the site, I'd say use the contact link at the bottom of the site.
dsalas@vt.edu is the webmaster.
Thanks! I'll try to remember this tomorrow when I can form a coherent email.