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Ok.. If you don't know what baseball is, raise your hand and Tommy will come over and hit you on the head with a tackhammer because you are a RETARD!

Actually, coming from Europe to the USA I only had a vague idea that Baseball was something like the sport of Rounders and was beloved of Charlie Brown. Aside from a few other countries it's not really well known outside of the US, which is a great shame since it's a sport I've come to love since moving here.

Here's a good introduction to the sport courtesy of Wikipedia. Or, better still just watch a few games. Warning: addictive!

Go Yankees!

Considering the day, there is one team that they have written a story or two about that you might have heard of.

http://old.yankees.com/ ?

Odd that it's "the official site of the Anaheim Angels" , does this seem odd to anyone else? I'm not a big fan of baseball but I did not know that Anaheim angels preceeded the New York Yankees :-)

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While the designers have clearly achieved a striking look and their navigational design is OK, they really hurt their site by using NESTED framesets. I couldn't believe it when I tried to load the largest pane into its own window.

Once I figured out how to break the page down into components, I took a look at the box-menu. This is displayed when you are in the Box Office section of the site. Is it really necessary to create a set of tables within this small segment of the page, just to give immediate visual feedback to a newby? Wouldn't you expect that a box labeled "Stadium Seating Map" would do something if you clicked it? Why not the old-fashioned GIF and image map?

With respect to the analogies to physical architectural design flying around in Katz's article, I'll agree that there are several schools of thought in the Web Development community. The people that designed this site belong to the Broadband School, which tends to neglect the typical user's configuration because they are trying to achieve a look that will knock your socks off. The Realist School knows that the typical consumer has a commercial on-line service (like AOL) and a Winmodem, which provides much less bandwidth than most of us are used to.

So, yes, I'll agree with Katz that they've got all of the information that their customers expect. But, I totally disagree that they have produced a usable site. The people in charge need to go back, deconstruct a few successful consumer sites, and figure out how to deliver the same information, with a similar look and feel, on much less complex pages.

While the designers have clearly achieved a striking look and their navigational design is OK, they really hurt their site by using NESTED framesets. I couldn't believe it when I tried to load the largest pane into its own window.

Once I figured out how to break the page down into components, I took a look at the box-menu. This is displayed when you are in the Box Office section of the site. Is it really necessary to create a set of tables within this small segment of the page, just to give immediate visual feedback to a newby? Wouldn't you expect that a box labeled "Stadium Seating Map" would do something if you clicked it? Why not the old-fashioned GIF and image map?

With respect to the analogies to physical architectural design flying around in Katz's article, I'll agree that there are several schools of thought in the Web Development community. The people that designed this site belong to the Broadband School, which tends to neglect the typical user's configuration because they are trying to achieve a look that will knock your socks off. The Realist School knows that the typical consumer has a commercial on-line service (like AOL) and a Winmodem, which provides much less bandwidth than most of us are used to.

So, yes, I'll agree with Katz that they've got all of the information that their customers expect. But, I totally disagree that they have produced a usable site. The people in charge need to go back, deconstruct a few successful consumer sites, and figure out how to deliver the same information, with a similar look and feel, on much less complex pages.

Unfortunately, it appears the online store part of the site is done in ASP. Of course, that may explain why it is completely un-integrated into the look and feel of the site. Probably some contract job or off-the-shelf ecommerce system.

I think the site Jon is talking about is
yankees.com