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 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.
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.