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Pre-Madness Spotlight: NCAA Conference Websites
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Posted on March 12, 2009 under Design Galleries
March in America is synonymous with college basketball. All 30 of the conferences in Division I college sports have a basketball tournament this week leading up the NCAA tournament, so in honor of “championship week”, I thought it would be interesting to see what each conference’s website looked like.
I’m a huge fan of college basketball this time of year – but then again, who isn’t. I find championship week to be almost as compelling as the NCAA tournament itself. In a majority of the conferences, it’s win or go home – the champion gets an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, and the loser’s season is over.
I’ll use any excuse I can think of to take a look around at the state of websites related to a particular subject. I’ve written about TV channels and Olympic national teams in the past, so naturally, I felt this was good an opportunity as any to look at more websites. I went to each conference’s website, took a screenshot of it, and put them together below with links back to the website.
What I thought of the websites
I have to say that I’m not quite sure what to make of what I found. And in retrospect, I’m not quite sure what I was expecting these websites to look like.
My initial impression of these websites it that you can definitely tell that they are very media-oriented. They all feature content that probably doesn’t get a lot of media coverage elsewhere – on-campus updates, player profiles, game results, etc. – and that relates to all of the other sports that schools compete in that don’t get as much attention as basketball or football.
When it comes to the designs, if I could sum them up in one word, I’d have to use the word “busy”. I wasn’t particularly blown away by any of the designs, and there were a few things that I noticed that seemed to go against good design principles:
- Random color schemes – The color schemes were all across the board, which gave varied impressions of each conference in general. Color can have a big impact on what your website says about you, as I’ve written about elsewhere.
- Visual clutter – There were a lot of graphic advertisements and pictures that made the websites very distracting visually. A lot of these conferences probably make good money from the advertisements they feature, but when you combine those with the streaming video AND the photos AND the color schemes, the designs just feel crowded and difficult to navigate, rather than clean and usable.
- Left alignment – Most of the websites were left-aligned in the browser window, which is something that most designers don’t do anymore. Whenever I see websites that do that, I get a dated feel from them, even if they aren’t.
- Dual navigations – A lot of the conferences featured two primary navigations – one that ran horizontally across the top and another that ran vertically down the left. If I were to redesign these websites, I would suggested using a drop-down menu that might combine both navigations into one more usable format.
But, I’ll let you be the judge. Without further ado, here are the websites.
The conference websites
America East
Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC)
Atlantic Sun
Atlantic 10
Big 10
Big 12
Big East
Big Sky
Big South
Big West
Colonial Athletic Association (CAA)
Conference USA
Horizon League
Ivy League
Mid-American Conference (MAC)
Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC)
Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC)
Missouri Valley Conference
Mountain West
Northeast
Ohio Valley
Pac 10
Patriot League
Southeast Conference (SEC)
Southern Conference
Southland Conference
Summit League
Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC)
Sun Belt Conference
Western Athletic Conference (WAC)
West Coast Conference (WCC)
Thoughts?
So, now that you’ve seen all of the conference websites, what do you think? Are there any that you really liked or disliked? Are there any specific improvements that you think could be made to make such content-heavy websites more usable? Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.
P.S. – Championship Week ends this weekend with “selection Sunday”, so next week I’ll be publishing a similar post featuring the websites of the schools that are automatic bids from each conference.
Similar Posts
- Best and Worst Websites of NCAA Tournament Teams (March 20, 2009)
- March Madness Really Starts in November (November 10, 2008)
- The Creative Freelancers Conference (July 15, 2008)
Ezra wrote on March 12, 2009:
Wow, those are some pretty difficult to navigate (and yes, definitely busy) websites.
A lot of them have similar tourney intros this week, and poking around most have a copyright of CBS Sports, I wonder if CBS designs (and probably updates) the websites for most of the conferences? Would also explain how many have a similar cluttered design with poorly placed video and ads.
That said, I thought Big Ten was the best of a mediocre group, cleaner than most of the others and I especially like what they did with the school links at the top – some others have similar, but in my opinion it looks best here.
Posted at 10:38 pm
Addicott Web wrote on March 13, 2009:
I thought the Big Ten’s website was the best one too – although I use the term “best” very loosely. Maybe it’s just because all of the schools in that conference are familiar to most people, but the logos and placement stand out so much more compared to some of the other conferences that did the same thing – especially the smaller conferences that no one has heard of.
I wonder if some of these conferences will eventually migrate to an ESPN-like interface, with a much simpler navigation that uses drop-down menus to help organize the content better. (Although I do think that there are things that could be improved on that design too, but that’s another story.
Posted at 9:29 am