Week 4B: Principles of Good Social Media Design

Below are links and explanations of two websites I frequently use.

1.) Surfline (https://www.surfline.com/)

I try to surf three to four times a week and using a website like Surfline makes it easy. Surfline allows its user to access surf cameras to get live pictures of what the surf looks like in real time. It also tells you what the surf forecast is, the water temperature, the type of wetsuit recommended and even the tide and wind forecasts.

I really like the website because it's easy to navigate. Everything is broken up into categories. The "Cams and Reports" section is organized in such a way that makes it VERY easy to find what you're looking for. The same goes for the "Forecast" section. You simply select your continent, then the state, the region and from there, it breaks up the popular beaches within that area. All of the key information is posted for each surf break. Things like swell direction, wind, surf height and the tide are all listed, making each surf site informative for the user which is the main reason why I continue to use the site.

As far as improvements, I don't really have many suggestions which I suppose is probably a good thing. The only critique I have is that the site doesn't have cameras posted for every single beach spot in the county. Now that being said, I realize cameras are costly and there's probably a reason why they don't cameras at certain surf breaks. My guess is there's enough data to justify which beaches are most commonly searched or accessed by surfers compared to one's that are not, one's that don't have cameras posted.

2.) ESPN (http://www.espn.com/)

ESPN is one of my all-time favorite websites to access. Because I work in the sports industry, I use this website a lot and for good reason. All of the most up to date information including stats, news and scores are posted in real time. When you see the home page, all of the live scores of the games are seen in the header, the biggest storyline or news of the day is the main article, followed by other story lines and then on the right hand side, there's the day biggest headlines posted. It makes it very easy for the sports consumer or business professional like myself to easily access the latest in sports.

I've mentioned before that I think layout and organization are key to what makes a website affective. ESPN has created tabs for every single sport imaginable. The great thing is that the layout for each sports page is the exact same. When you want to learn more about just the NFL, that page is going to look the exact same if you were to click on the Golf tab. The information of course is different, but knowing that each page layout is going to be consistent alleviates any confusion when navigating the site.

I choose to use this website given the reasons I've stated above. The real time scores, injury updates and news of the day make it very easy to stay up to date with what's going on across all sports. In addition, there's always good "recap" articles for every game, in any sport, that often times provide informative, insightful game information and story lines for the respective sport.

The only suggestion I would have for improvement would be to include more information and stats on smaller schools. Schools like UCSD and USD don't really have much in the way of information posted and it's because they aren't the biggest sports schools, which I understand. But as a sports fan, it would be nice to have access to the necessary sports information for those schools.




Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 17, 2018 at 2:14 PM

    I absolutely love surfline! I also use it practically everyday and love its simplicity and easily navigable layout.

    ReplyDelete

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