Wanted: Your ideas for the new F1 Fanatic
F1 Fanatic last had a redesign at the beginning of 2007 and it’s starting to look a bit tired in places.
There’s a whole host of new functionality I want to add to the site and there’s a lot of work to do in making it load more quickly and less prone to crashing.
But I also want to know what your ideas are for the site. How would you change F1 Fanatic? What bits should be chucked out and what should we keep?
Feel free to suggest anything including article or series ideas, changes to the layout of the site, the live blogs, the forum or anything else.
I’m going to be working on the new version of the site during the off-season. If you’ve got web design experience – particularly with PHP and MySQL – and would like to volunteer to help out, please let me know.
Thanks to everyone who replied top my earlier request for help with optimising the site. I’ve taken lots of your suggestions on board and will be in touch with you about further developments.
In the meantime, please let me know what you’d like to see on F1 Fanatic in the future!
IDR said on 8th November 2009, 8:21
First of all, Keith, you have one of the very-best F1 sites on the web.
My two cents on this topic:
1) F1 FANATIC LOGO:
I agree you should actualize this logo a little bit. The font is little bit out of fashion. Maybe, as I’m “minimalist oriented” I don’t like so much those fonts with “excessive design”.
Color scheme: Green and Blue can mix good but your green doesn’t mach quite well (IMHO) with your light blue. I think pure green (00FF00) could match much better (and making your light blue lighter than the current one). Those colors mix very well with dark grey.
And as previously suggested, you should make the head of the site without including advertising at the right part of it, that devaluates your head and your logo.
In any case, not being a designer, I’ve made some logos (and corporate image) for some companies as a hobby.
Wouldn’t be great if you ask all your readers for a new logo proposals?
Will be a great topic for off season, so every of us could vote for the designs all we could send you! (And I think some of the readers you have are professional designers Becken?)
2) Comments:
This part is really one of the best one things your site has, but it would be great if you can ad some little improvements:
Let the people recommend the comments. I’m not sure about adding “negative” (not recommend the comment) but having a raking of the best ones, allowing the reader to organize the comments by: Newest entries, Oldest entries and most recommended, will be great.
3) Articles in Brief, Forums:
As someone else have suggested, is something that is not well placed now. I’ve been reading this site since 2 years, and still today I loose some good brief articles or forum topics because one have to pay so much attention to realize there is something new there.
For that case, may I suggest you to ask us for a new design of your site and make some kind of poll allowing us to vote for the best one!! Another off season topic, that could be great!!!
4) Images:
Full size images is one of the most appreciated features of your site!!!! Please keep it despite it takes a lot of server space.
On the oder hand, I you should improve the navigation scheme. Now is a little bit annoying you have to do 3 clicks (and charge three pages), to take full size image.
Having an Image gallery feature allowing to see all pics in slideshow, and download directly those ones you are interested on (or all of them in one click) would be great!!!!
5) Finance:
Keith you are doing a great job here, and I’m still amazed you have to make a full time job for finance your passion! I honestly think, you should create a voluntary membership (60€-90€ a year) giving those members ( in return) just the possibility of creating a forum topic using all site features (upload images, video content…) Some kind of premium account.
I’m not particularly upset with the quantity of ads your site has as well as the content of this Ads, but not being a professional I really wonder why you cannot have a good funding with ads, keeping in mind the number of readers. Anyway, more ads with the current scheme (not pop-up windows of Casinos on-line..) it will not hurt (IMHO) your site quality.
And my last suggestion: Change your pic in “about F1 fanatic.co.uk”!!! :-) :-)
IDR said on 8th November 2009, 8:42
Oh I forgot to make another suggestion:
Many of us, are Joe Saward’s blog readers also.
He has a good F1 knowledge and produce good articles about F1 life (and paddock gossip), but we know he is not as good as you with web technology. His blog is very basic (to put it mildly).
Wouldn’t be great if you offer him to join this site with an specific column for him?
He would take advantage of all your hard work in the site available for his articles (and comments) and both will benefit of increasing traffic.
I know I’m going beyond your question, but you asked…
Maksutov said on 8th November 2009, 18:59
I think IDR you have some excellent suggestions,
eg.
-Allow the readers to vote for the designs of the logo and site,.. etc
-Let the people recommend the comments.
most of all IDR your suggestion for Keith to:
“create a voluntary membership … giving those members ( in return) just the possibility of creating a forum topic using all site features (upload images, video content…) Some kind of premium account.”
Is a pretty good idea i must say. Furthermore, those members could have the ability to enter an alternate prize winning contest (in addition to the one that already exists). This would make the membership more attractive and ads another interesting dimension to the idea to raise some funds. ;)
Maksutov said on 8th November 2009, 19:05
adds*
Siwongo said on 8th November 2009, 8:43
My only suggestion is to please centre the page. I really don’t like having to look to my left every time I come here, I know I can minimise by window and put that in the centre, but if possible I would like it in the centre in the first place.
David Pedro said on 8th November 2009, 9:11
Hi Keith,
your blog is great and I only want to change one thing: could you add the “Blog Archive” section so that we could see some older posts of yours?
Other than that, the blog’s great!
Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine) said on 8th November 2009, 10:46
The archive is under ‘About’ at the moment: http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/credits-and-contacts/f1fanatic-archive/
Woffin said on 8th November 2009, 11:00
I think your site is excellent Keith :) top job! When you load the homepage, you can see everything you need to so and you dont have to go searching for stuff because its all right infront of your face.
Two little suggestions though that are probably only nitpicking :)
1 – Any chance of putting the adverts on the left? Sometimes when there is a large image on the page, the adverts will go over the top (see the recent forum post about Piquets singapore telemetry).
2 – Easier navigation of the pictures archive? If I want to have a look at some of the pictures from melbourne or even last year then I have to cycle through quite a few pages before I get to them.
Apart from that, I cant really think of anything else. Hope the redesign goes well! Please keep the colour scheme though :D
joe said on 8th November 2009, 11:15
have a ‘race day’ site, which is a slim version that can handle the extra hits you get on the busy periods on sundays
slr said on 8th November 2009, 11:16
Maybe you could have the background as a picture for the next GP, like on the official F1 site.
gaz said on 8th November 2009, 12:58
keith, firstly thanks for another great season’s reporting.
how about a “on this day in history” article every now and again would be a good way to highlight f1′s history and would get a few of the old un’s talking!!!!!!
Tom Chiverton said on 8th November 2009, 14:04
I wouldn’t write your own platform – use and customise something like Drupal instead. Life is too short, and you could use the time to write more good articles :-)
Sush Meerkat said on 8th November 2009, 14:54
Searching on an old article needs an to be redone.
date and time stamp on comments would be good too.
Sush Meerkat said on 8th November 2009, 14:54
thats done, but in replies too.
Chaz said on 8th November 2009, 17:07
I have a few ideas.
It would be good to bring back the editing tool in the comments.
I think a calendar displayed prominently on the front page that when you select any date in the past, will show all archived articles in full and brief posted for that day. This would be less cumbersome and tedious than scrolling back to read previous posts in full. This is also great when some days articles have been missed. I personally don’t find the search engine very effective and thus useful. I’ve seen this tool before on other sites and its fantastic! Similarly it would be nice to scroll back through previous (or archived) forum postings and maybe this could be included into the calendar idea.
Alex Cooper said on 8th November 2009, 20:40
My phone’s browser used to crash on the site prior to the launch of the mobile version, which is great.
This site’s excellent but I think it’s become a victim of its own success – there are SO many posts on items now, especially the more controversial ones, that there’s a huge amount to scroll and read through before you can be certain that no-one’s made the same comment.
That’s not a design issue though!
Good stuff, Keith.
Brian said on 8th November 2009, 22:28
I know this might be a bit of extra work, but I was thinking that maybe you could ad an, “This day in F1 History” thing. Just like a one sentence blurb about some driver or team. It doesn’t have to be daily, it could be by week or race, like if the upcoming race was in Canada, at the beginning of the week you could have piece of interesting history relating to past Canadian races.
Or a piece of trivia and if you are competing in the F1 Pool, you could win an extra few points if you were the first person to get the correct answer.
Armen said on 8th November 2009, 22:32
I think we need a better photo hosting/viewing solution. Maybe even just move to a dedicated photo hosting solution that’s gonna provide the latest/greatest in slideshows and the like. Sign up for a SmugMug account?
Also I’d like to see a switch to some better/dedicated forum software. The current forums are pretty elementary and topics get repeated or are not easy to search through.
Everything else is great, including the live blogs. Keep up the good work.
matt said on 8th November 2009, 23:37
Championship standings should be displayed clearly, maybe permanantly at the right of the screen.
muckymuck said on 9th November 2009, 0:28
I think the site is pretty good as it is. If you do make updates, make sure you keep the colors and font as they are like sato113 said.
I would love it if you had a championship table like the WRC table that lists the drivers on the left and the race on the top, then the points scored for each driver for each race. That table is so easy to understand and you can get a picture of the entire season in one glance.