While perusing through one of our most recent launched sites, The University of Mary Marauders, I found myself on one of the SIDEARM Sports schedule pages – and I came to the realization that (especially given the vitally important nature of these pages) they were pretty visually unexciting…and perhaps even a bit confusing.

Knowing it was time for a visual overhaul, my design team spent the next few hours scouring the web for examples of well-presented schedules – NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, you name it, I bet we looked at it, saving bits and pieces of sites that we thought were both easy on the eyes, and simple to understand.

Today, I’m proud to present a prototype of a new look for the schedule pages. This look is still very much in its infancy, and I’m sure there may be additional enhancements and visual changes that are included when it makes its debut in early 2012, but I wanted to give you a look into what we’re working on.

Click to view:



Some notes about our intentions:

1)Consolidated Fan Options: Fans like to print, email, and even subscribe to your schedules, and although all of these options are currently available, they’re not very prominent. These options are now grouped together at the top of the page for ease of use.

2)Home/Away Notation: Previously, the differentiator between home and away games was use of bold(or not bold) text. Realizing it should be easier to quickly see the difference, the background color of the row now correlates to the status of the game. There is also a key including on the top of the schedule for quick reference too.

3)Current Record: This area was very visually confusing. Completely overhauled visually, our intent is also to give you more control over what shows in this area, being able to show/hide information that is relevant to your schedule.

4)Opponent Logos: Many schools choose to include your opponent’s logo in the “Details” view currently. Fans can now quickly scan and find the logo of the game they’re looking for, and it’s also a pretty nice visual as well. If the logo for your opponent isn’t available, your own logo will show in “grey” instead.

5)Conference Game Notation: Previously this was done will all kinds of punctuation - asterisks, hash marks, percentage signs and everything in between created a completely confusing experience for visitors. Now, you can clearly mark conference games with your conference abbreviation, making it much easier to see which games are part of the in-conference schedule.

6)Win/Loss: Once a game is finished, the far right column of in-game links will clearly display the result.

7)Pre-Game/Post-Game Links: The second column includes game information – including space underneath the game location for customizable pre-game links before the game, and post-game links for after the game.

8)Tournament Games: Tournament games are now clearly visually marked as a group, with no need to select a different color for each tournament. Yes, that’s right.. we’re revoking your ability to turn the schedule page into a rainbow :-)

I hope you’ll agree that this is will be a great visual addition to your site! Our engineers are working this (and many, many other enhancements) now, and we’ll be sure to let you all know as soon as this look is available for use. If you have any thoughts or feedback in the meantime, they are certainly welcome.

Happy Holidays!
Chris