………. and it is less functional than the old site

What a disaster this has turned out to be, I thought that the new website will be all singing and dancing with lots of new features and interesting things for us all to look at, well sadly not.

We still have no Accessibility for disabled people, simple things like access keys, tab index’s, screen readers tags would give the 25% of internet users who are disabled a better chance of being apart of the sport, as a owner of a website design firm these are the most simplistic functions of a modern website and things that are added right at the start of development not a second thought or placed because the site owners would like to be politically correct.

Remember the disability act which caused such a storm a few years back because every publicly accessible building had to have a ramp or lift fitted so people with disabilities and wheelchair users could access those buildings, well the act does actually cover website access also if you are offering a public service, you could say that WorldSnooker.com is not offering a public service but by the simple advertisement of tickets and merchandise they are.

So let me list what is wrong, actually it may be quicker to list what is correct but for information purposes we will list what is wrong then we can see how quickly everything gets fixed.

• Dates are all wrong on the news section
• Every time you goto the home page that video starts playing (Web design 101 – NO auto play video)
• Brackets – Where have they gone? you can not look back at past results via the brackets anymore, look at the UK Championships brackets, they are not even fulled out with the results!
• Format pages – making simple titles bold or even how a proper website would do it and use H1, H2, H3, H4 tags and format those individually would be nice, we want to look at this information and understand it instantly not decipher the page like puzzle before we can see the information.
• Draws Page – yeah and! so we can see the draw for The UK Championships (Before the qualifiers were added) but how can we see the draw for the next events, German Masters, The Masters etc?
• Calendar page – Seriously formatting needs to be used, example this is making something bold, this is making something a different colour, why the events are made bold and not something simple like the Months is beyond me
• Celebrity Fans – the old site was broken into separate pages for all the celebs, the new site they have just dropped all the content into one page …… and where have all the pictures gone which were with these articles?
• Commercial Information – Please Check Back Later is says!
• The Rules of Snooker – again formatting would be nice instead of one huge block of text, break it up use headers to distinguish between sections, named anchors with links would be a good start, this is how it should be – http://www.jesterssnooker.co.uk/snooker/the_rules_of_snooker.php
• Official Coaches – FORMATTING C’mon, separate each coach with atleast a line break
• Rankings – you click world ranking and then you have to click on that page again to get the rankings!!! why? same with seeding, PTC Order of Merit.
• Here are all the links that do not work – Benevolent Fund – Snooker Links, these work form the main navigation but not form the footer navigation!
• RSS Feeds - Still no RSS feeds very disappointing.
• Favicon – The little favicon is missing, nothing major but I used to navigate my tabs by seeing where that favicon was in my browser.

OMG do not even get me going on the stats pages!!!!! what a huge disappointment form a governing body, please bring back the old website – I never thought I would ever say that

Probably the worst thing of all about the website is the fact that no inbound links work! if you have linked to a page on WorldSnooker.com prom your website / Facebook / Twitter you will now be faced with a 404 page not found, a simple .htaccess file can sort this out, at the end of the day the information is all still there just on a new slightly changed URL, everything is still coming form the same database as the old site was.

If you are going to do something as drastic as change where all your content is which is always a bad idea when updating a website then atleast do it properly and fully start form fresh.

The old website was designed by www.ibltd.com and even with the problems on the site which were down to this initial design the was actually functional, you could select a tournament and have easy one click access to the draw, tickets, schedule, news etc ok once a new event was up and running it was hard to go back and find the old information for a tournament but if you know a little about how websites work you could do it or even just use old links which have been posted up on sites like www.TheSnookerForum.com

The new company www.performgroup.co.uk need to learn a little about navigation and why have they built the site around having to click two links to get to some information instead on only clicking one link!

This is not all bad, well it is for World Snooker but it is good for the new breed of sites, just visit www.ProSnookerBlog.com if you want match reports and rankings informaiton – www.TheSnookerForum.com for event and Snooker chat including a bracketing system for the tournaments and www.TheSnookerBlog.com for information from Snooker all over the globe.

Once WorldSnooker.com is back up and running I will finish off my analysis, until then here is a screen shot of what you are not missing out on.

WorldSnooker.com New Site Design

Final rant, I am sure they will sort it out over time and improve the site but what really needs to be done is for it to be handed over to a experienced company that knows how to build sports websites, not a firm that says they know how to build a sports website.

This is what a sports website for a governing body should look and function like – www.irb.com or http://www.wru.co.uk/23042.php