Golf Week
Problem
Golf Week.com had a very familiar problem when they came to us to help redesign their website. Their site was choc-ful of valuable golf news information, from event coverage for juniors through pros, scoreboard info, product reviews and golf course information, but the organization of all this content made the site harder to navigate, resulting in higher bounce rates and less interaction with the content. Additionally, Garcia Media had just redesigned the print magazine, giving it a more modern look, taking advantage of the wonderful photography and making it easier to navigate. The leadership at GolfWeek.com wanted the same thinking—more modern, taking advantage of the robust video and photo galleries, making it easier to navigate, and also highlighting the interactive and community features that were being offered.
“Before” Golf Week Homepage
Process
We started the project by taking a complete content inventory of all the different types of information offered by Golf Week. Collectively, we decided a site with this much information needs a visual organization system so that users can seamlessly find the specific information they are interested in or dive right into the site features they want to use, like video, blogs or the community boards. Once we created a new information architecture the task became to create a design that would translate Golf Week’s mission of keeping users up to date on the latest news and information, while providing valuable and relevant information to a variety of golf audiences.
Early design concept
Outcome
The online team at Golf Week, led by Eric Soderstrom did a great job of implementing the design and enhancing it with their own ideas. The redesigned site segments this information by function, where the top part of the page is for news, either in article or video format for the top stories, headlines, which could be customized, and the popular staff blogs. The next part of the site as you scroll down is for the community or interactive features, which includes reader blogs and the latest from the community boards. The next part of the site is the scoreboard, where you can browse the leaderboards and rankings from the different pro tours, or from the junior, college and amateur ranks. The bottom part of the page is for product or golf course reviews and information. This visual segmentation of information helps the scanning process.