I also wrote about Tampere United’s redesign. Well yeah, site sucks almost as much as the team this season, but that’s a whole different matter altogether.

Anyway, got annoyed at last by the crappy news-section and decided to make a feed for United, too.

Feel free to use it!

(Direct url: http://feed43.com/tampereunited.xml)

Related posts:

1. Tampere United and Feeds
2. Tampere United Redesign
3. Custom Feeds.

Tampere United, my local football (soccer, natürlich!) team, just released a redesign of their site.

My first opinion: WTF?

Flash, Javascript, font size even smaller than it used to be, almost everything displayed as images (and the list goes on and on and on).

77 validation errors (according to W3C’s Validator). And yes, although valid HTML is not the key to happiness, it is certainly a measure of quality.

News -section at front page done with flash (sic!). WTF?

Antti Pohja’s so-called Blog: no RSS, no proper archives, no commenting. Nice stories, though, no complaints to Ato!

Tested with Opera Mini Simulator (latest version):

• with mobile browsing off (no mobile view):
  Looks quite nice. News don’t work. Menu doesn’t work. Sponsor -list doesn’t work. Images look terrible (at lo-res).
• mobile browsing on (mobile view):
  Fucking awful (imho)! (Menu comes first, news don’t work at front page, ad’s are really, really big and so on).

Visually the redesign is quite ok. Huge player up front is a nice touch, visually speaking. Colours go well with the team colours (blue and green).

Bearing accessibility and usability in mind the redesign is a total failure:

• Menu system is based on drop-down menus (CSS-based, I’ll give you that!), but still really hard to use for people with disabilities or for the elderly.
• Layout is fixed (try to enlarge the text, see what happens! How about lower resolutions, like 800×600?)
• Reading order (linearized) is not logical.
• Alternative texts for images and other content are not that informative (like the picture with team’s goalie, Mikko Kaven: Icon 01 Kaven) or seem to be missing completely
• No images? Almost no content at Front Page! (Screen capture to the right)

Summary:

I don’t like this redesign. There’s nothing new for me and the old features are even worse than they were. But, as I already am a fan of TamU, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Perhaps time will tell if I grow to like this one, too. Like I did with the older ones.

Edit:
There seems to be some new features, though. One is videos from games attached to reports (example), with interviews. Too bad this isn’t, technically speaking, not that good. Flash video, yes. Why, oh why does it start automatically?
Overall quality of videos is good, have to give you that!

Related posts:

1. Pretty URLs (or Aamulehti redesign)
2. Enter the Tampere United feed
3. Tampere United and Feeds