The NFL Website Gets a Facelift

The new NFL season is about to start on September 10, 2009 and the league is actively preparing for it with a re-launch of its homepage. Page design, video player and scoreboard features have been changed to reflect (American) football fan's needs.

Launched yesterday, the new design still has its flaws but admins are working on them. Outed in 1996, the website has gone through serious changes (see attached photos), always incorporating fresh technologies and reflecting the state of the Internet.

Usually ranked by Alexa between the 950-1,000 positions, the website still remains very slow, due to its heavy dose of JavaScript and Flash. All of these features come as the NFL is preparing to launch a bunch of new services, or improvements to some old products.

The frontpage has seen little redesign in comparison with the previous version, only the header, match scores section, upper menu and the footer menu having been modified, the main content display remaining the same.

The video page has been launched for quite a while now and introduced the ability to comment on every video, similar to services provided by YouTube.
 
Increased upgrades are brought to the Game Center area where user feedback has been introduced alongside a bunch of new features. We had some difficulties loading the page, though. It has a tendency to block the browser (several browsers) for two to three minutes until the page written in JavaScript is completely loaded. Prototype and Script.aculo.us were used as main libraries because the Game Center contains a huge amount of JavaScript-driven GUI. But being just the second day, we're sure that NFL developers will have this fixed till the start of the season.

The Game Center in an important part of the website since, on game days, every football fan will load this page to see scores and match details. This redesign has also destroyed many plans for fantasy football websites that were using the Game Center as their statistics source, parsing match information to update their own database.

Fresh services were introduced for website users. The NFL Game Pass, a service that lets users stream NFL games at HD quality from the web will now be offered non-stop and will also include the NFL Network, the official TV channel of the League.

And talking about TV channels, the league will launch a second channel heavily advertised on its website, entitled Red Zone, that will air on game days, automatically jumping from game to game, displaying key moments and plays. It is not specified whether the channel will be offered with Game Pass or not.