Norwich City FC Website

Friday July 27th, 2012

I support Norwich City FC for a couple of decades now and recently, @NorwichCityFC said on twitter that they have unveiled their new look website.

I loaded the website in Safari … it’s still loading. Maybe they are having ‘teething problems’.

Let me refresh again.

What is taking so long?

Time to crank up Firefox and Chrome.

Same loading issues.

I think I get a cup of tea. Tea normally solves everything.

*time passes*

Let’s try again. The entire page loaded in about 30 seconds? Is it my ‘net connection? It can’t be. Everything else shows up okay.

Here’s the full site as on the desktop.. (hang on, did I see a main background before the banner loaded?)

My reaction? The site is an entire mess. Let me break it all down for you.

  1. Accessibility issue. Black text on green is not ideal. Black on yellow on the other hand may work for some. Consider changing black for white.
  2. This single image is about 170 KB download. Add in 3 more and you are averaging about 600 KB.
  3. Search/Follow are out of sight and they don’t line up in my eyesight.
  4. Video player issue? “Unified Player Alternative Content” is meaningless. Flash is on the way out.
  5. Advertisers are distracting. It is a nice idea to put in similar advertising method that features around the football ground and it does not work for the web.
  6. This is dwarfed by the advertiser banner and had no place around this area.
  7. Poor choice of icons.
  8. Are you trying to hide some nonsense here?

Additional point: The navigation link of a white background overlapping existing white boxes on the site is a joke. You are not helping the person to understand the functionality of your site.

When you build a website, quality start at the beginning, middle and end. Unfortunately for this website, it started somewhere near the beginning and ruined itself all the way to the end. There is no flow as the middle sections containing information boxes are not helping. I don’t know where to start. You are the controller of the website, you must guide me to start somewhere.

This does not stop there. Let’s see how the responsive web design works on the iPad.

What a crock…

  1. Navigation bar overlapping the banner? Come on…
  2. Search and follow over lapping banner + banner arrows.
  3. Main content clutter…

I had to stop here and you have got to see how bad the accessibility are on this…

(Shot taken on iOS Simulator)

The background isn’t dark enough to allow the gallery to stand out.

I’m going to move onto the iPhone now.

(Shot taken on iOS Simulator)

My iPhone 3GS barely can scroll down. Laugh if you will for me owning a three year old iPhone and yet this is pretty much the minimal handset to work on.

I don’t get it because Norwich City FC talked about their new website and showing a photos from desktop to phone prompting myself to think there is responsive web design in built in. For the records, please don’t build ‘a mobile website’ to solve this problem.

Here is my word of advice for Norwich City FC web team.

You shouldn’t have released this.

There isn’t a sustainable amount of testing going on here.

If you expect the person to wait 30 seconds or less for a page to load or somebody accessing your website on tablets/phones. You got to think about that again. Nobody wants to download 2.1MB of data of images, text, javascripts… Oh I saw some empty <div>s around there too.

Oh… what’s this by the way in your source code?

<meta name="description" content="Club"/>
<meta name="author" content="Author_1"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="Club"/>

No description? No author? No SEO?

I’m not slamming your website.

I’m trying to help you to understand the state of the web today and applying it to become the leading standard for football websites.

By offering smooth design that speaks to us, grab our eyesights into areas that means something that we care about, interact you over social media networks, responsive web design on the desktop, tablets and phones. Make our muscle memory know where to find the latest score, stats and the likes. Who’s who around the club. Most importantly, enjoying the game!

What is stopping you to produce an ideal website?

After all, Norwich City FC took on a rouge manager three years ago and a club that was circling the toilet. Now, they are in the Premier League. Whatever you guys did was risky.

This isn’t happening here.

You are playing it safe.