Really cool college wrestling website | Hacker News Reader

Really cool college wrestling website

wrestlestat.com

1 pointandegre5 comments

Here's a really cool college wrestling website. Contains TONS of information about teams and wrestlers. For teams, you can see rosters, depth charts, schedules, eligibility breakdowns. For wrestlers you can all of their matches results for their career. Site also offers it's own ranking system which generates wrestler rankings, dual rankings, as well as tournament rankings. The dual and tournament rankings are one-of-a-kind. Also offers two different types of fantasy games, one a week-to-week challenge, and also a tournament challenge similar to NCAA Basketball brackets. Can also personalize the website to follow your favorite wrestlers and/or schools.

Minor comment, I think you should point out that you run the site. Unfortunately there are a lot of hit-and-run self-promoters on HN, and they tend to use a style similar to this. I usually flag them if I see them, especially when the content has little to do with HN's readership.

Your comment history shows you are not one of those. I think if you had written ".... wrestling website I run." you would improve the chance of getting some feedback from other HNers, because it's a more personal connection.

My market is completely different from yours. All I can offer is encouragement in your effort.

As someone with no interest wrestling, I browsed around a bit out of curiosity. Would it be reasonable to add more links? You have the Twitter handles, but I have to copy/paste to get there, and there is no home page. These could be linked, by icon, inside the the ws-header for the school page.

Will there be (possibly user-submitted) links to photos from recent meets? What about links from the upcoming tournaments to the web site for the tournament?

I don't think it's that important for most people to see "This is a cached page, it was last updated: 9/16/2016 10:43:18 PM" / "View version: Click here for live version | Cached version" right at the top of the content. Even if they cared about cache status, I think "Last updated 5 seconds ago" would be easier to interpret. Especially as it isn't 10:43:18 PM in this time zone.

I realize this is all extra work, and you are self-funded. Feel free to ignore me!

Again, best of hopes that it goes well, and that you figure out a good funding model.

Yes, it is my site. If this was the wrong medium, I can delete the post if I have the ability (no idea as of writing this).

Regarding your feedback, THANK YOU! I like getting feedback from more technical people.

Yeah, that date (format) is really annoying to look at now that you bring it up. Makes much more sense to have it like you state (5 minutes ago...).

More links - I thought I had WAY too many links (been trying to figure out the SEO stuff also). Just about anywhere in the site where you see either a wrestlers name, or a school name, they are always links (except when they are in headers). I can definitely add the links in the headers, the side-effect to that is then they'll be underlined.

Cool idea on the photos and links to registration sites. Be fun way to interact with each of the "events" and feel more like you were there.

Thanks again for the feedback, I'll definitely work on most/all of those!

HN is a bit negative for this sort of thing, except as a "ShowHN", where it's clear that the interest for HN readers is that it's from another HN reader.

The question you should have, as a technical matter, is why your users should care about the cache state. Do you need it at all?

You worry that there are too many links. The problem isn't that there are too many links, but that they all look the same. The links I suggested could be icons, rather than text.

On http://www.wrestlestats.com/compare/wrestler I noticed that if the weight class is not given then the names are ordered first by weigh class and second by name, so it isn't alphabetic. As a usability suggestion, pulldown menus are harder to use than selection boxes. There are only 10 weight classes, so you could arrange them as:

  [any] [125] [133] ...

so people can do one click to change the class. Similarly, with the names you could have a multiple select box with rows="10" instead of a pulldown. You might also consider a side-by-side layout, because you have so much horizontal space. It would also help the balance of the page.

(BTW, the prediction code has an interesting failure mode. If you use the same name for A and B then the scores always differ by 1. Shouldn't the scores be tied?)

In general, I use what's called a user-centered design approach. (Bear in mind that I'm a backend person, so I don't do this often - I'm not an expert.) Come up with about 3-5 different types of personas who might use the site; fans, players, family, coach, etc. It's a bit more specific than that, see Alan Cooper's writings and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience) .

Pick the one persona you want to focus on, but keep the others in mind. Figure out what sort of things they want, and optimize for it.

For example, you have a comparison tool. There are two ways to get to a comparison, one from the tool I mentioned, another from the person's page, under "Projected Upcoming Matches". To get to that from the second one, the links are all "comparison".

If you want to optimize for that, then what about putting the prediction there instead, like "18 - 3 TF", and link that to the comparison page? (Of course, then it would be a prediction rather than a comparison, so the column header might change.)

For another example, and going back to the Twitter example, figure out for yourself the scenario where someone would use your app to find a team's Twitter handle, then see if there are ways to make it easier to use.

My one big pointer is that you should be aware that there may be no revenue to this. There used to be many ways to set up forum sites, and many small organizations would could put together specialized newsletters, and make money from specialized advertisement and membership fees. Facebook groups have sucked up most of that.

More great points/constructive criticism! Thank you! I'll work on/think about implementing that stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com