Why Some Football Stadiums Remind Me of Bad Web Sites This past Sunday I attended an out-of-town football game. As I coped with the unfamiliarity of the football stadium, I was struck by how it reminded me of poorly designed web sites - web sites that are not user-friendly. What better time or opportunity to write about this analogy than on this blog.

Poorly marked entranceways = poor search engine visibility: the gates at this stadium barely had any visibility. There was only one indication of the gate letter, affixed above the gate, but several of the gates were elevated and therefore above eye level. We barely knew where we were at any given time. It was like going to a search engine knowing what you were looking for but not being able to find it because the owner did a poor job making it easy for it to be found.

Poor directions once inside = poor web site navigation: It was bad enough finding the right gate, but once we found it, the stadium was no more helpful in telling us how to find anything else we were looking for. Restrooms and food signage was surprising inadequate, and finding our way back to our parking lot was a shot in the dark. Your web site's navigation plays an equally critical role. Don't assume that people come into your site the same place every time, and don't assume that once they get there, they can find where they want to go. Your site navigation should be ever-present, expressed multiple ways (main navigation, bottom page navigation, and internal page navigation should all help get your visitors where they want to go) and easy to figure out. Don't be coy with your navigation – you’re not helping anyone in the process.

Colors matter: Granted a football team has set colors, but the use of those colors is what catches the eye, and in this stadium, the colors looked drab, washed out, and generally unattractive. In my opinion, there was nothing about the way these colors were used that helped stimulate excitement. The same goes for the colors you select for your web site design. Don't take this lightly -- think about your business mission and what colors may work to help convey this mission.

Delivering expected content: I don't know about you, but I go to a live, professional football game, and I expect to see the action on big screen monitors, hear it over the speaker system, and be pulled into the spirit by great music and fan directives. This stadium had small monitors compared to my home team's stadium, its music was awful (violent and loud and not diverse), and the droll "DE-FENSE, DE-FENSE" was about the only thing they could get their fans to do. Overall, it was a lackluster experience for me. On your web site, don't let your visitors have a lackluster experience. Give them great content (articles, opinions, stats, white papers, case studies, freebies, etc.), and you'll leave them impressed and wanting more.

Too many options/bells & whistles are a distraction: In the general admission portion of the stadium, there's so much going on trying to get the consumer's attention that you can get overloaded to the point of total distraction. Likewise, on a web site, too many bells, whistles or whiz-bang features may show that you're cool, but can also lead the visitor away from the critical mission for which you brought them to your site in the first place.

Too low-tech in a modern age: for a relatively new stadium, this one was relatively low-tech, especially compared to stadiums of a comparable age. The result was that I was duly unimpressed. Likewise, an amateur looking web site really doesn't fly in this day and age. If you're trying to save a buck by having your college-aged nephew build your site, you'd also give due consideration to what that site might end up looking like to your prospective customers. On the web, you have 10 seconds or less to make an impression before your visitor is off to another site.

Upkeep: this new stadium's concrete steps are already crumbling, its bathrooms appear run down, and as I said, it seemed so low-tech that you'd think it was an old stadium. Like a poorly maintained structure, a web site with broken links, missing graphics and undirected pages (404 errors) leaves a bad impression. Be sure to have someone conducting regular web site maintenance to avoid such problems.

Ad placement and visibility: Most of this stadium's advertisements were pathetic, frankly. With the exception of the placements on the scoreboard, if I were the advertiser, I would seriously be questioning the value of my ad buys. Similarly, whether you're selling ad space on your site or looking to buy online advertising for your company, better to scrutinize where and how your ad is going to be displayed because some of it might be pointless or misplaced, and then no one is happy.

Labels: design, football, usability, web site

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