Cricinfo – fresh
Having trouble getting to Cricinfo through your bookmarks? I did. It seems they’ve revamped themselves (and dropped some of their old homepage links). Or rather, ESPN have revamped them.
Cricinfo was most certainly due for an upgrade. The old site was getting rather musty and was really looking like it had grown far beyond what the design and architecture could handle. It could take take quite a bit of digging to find stuff. And there was a confusing disparity between the design of the main site and the ‘magazine’ section.
My first impressions are that they have done really well in condensing all the links into the main menu and drop-down submenus. The Scores/Results/Fixtures widget on the homepage will also be very useful. It’s going to take me a while to get used to the new layout, but I suspect that the site will be significantly easier to use.
Design-wise, the new site makes some use of some gradients, round-cornered boxes and reflected text. It looks swisher than the old site, but is dated before it even went live. The dominant feature is a big black box with the latest news headlines. It must be something to do with the fact that the rest of the site is decked out in utterly characterless grey and light blue, but I don’t think there has ever been an uglier black box on the internet.
So good re-engineering, but not so wonderful in the design. Still, the content is far more important, so I have to say that after exploring it for all of 10 minutes I’m impressed by the new site so far.
