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I'm currently designing a news website based on sports betting. The sites content is mainly composed of blog posts from industry journalists. These posts are split up into 5 categories for each sport.

There is currently a debate about whether the home page slider should scroll through each sport, showing a generic photo of the sport. These generic photos link to the specific corresponding page. I.e.

[Generic football photo] --Links to-->    Football page
[Generic tennis photo]   --Links to-->    Tennis page

This is essentially like a nav bar, but instead a scroller as it provides the exact same function as the navigation.

The other side of the debate (my side) is that the slider should scroll through the 6 sports, displaying the latest article for each sport. The image should not be generic, but should correspond to this latest article. The slides should link to said article as well - as opposed to the specific sports page.

[Image from Latest Football article]     --Links to-->    Latest football article
[Image from Latest Tennis article]       --Links to-->    latest tennis article

I know that my way is better and more user friendly. What however are the reasons for this from a UX point of view?

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  • What is the rationale behind using a slider to show this? Do you mean a carousel?
    – JohnGB ♦
    Jan 20, 2013 at 20:24
  • I refer to it as a slider, I'm not sure it's the correct terminology. You can see it at the top of this page here fusedigital.eu The idea behind it is that it shows the latest news stories to the users... Would you say this is bad UX?
    – Adam Scot
    Jan 20, 2013 at 20:27

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I'm sorry to disappoint you, but in my opinion both ideas are equally valid from a UX perspective. The desicion being made has to be based on wheter or not you consider these different sports as separate sub sites without any relations to other sports or the opposite: This is one sports site with different news articles tagged with the sport on the article.

If this is one site - you're assumption is correct - display latest article and image in the carousel linking to the latest article.

If this is a segmented site made from different sub sites - make a generic sports image linking to the correct sub site.

- But how do I explain the single site to my client?

The internet is a constantly changing place where you gain respect for activity and change - not for the static. The search crawlers give higher rank to sites that change content frequently. Having a static navigation placeholder link carousel does not make search engine crawlers happy. If you want your site to be visited by more users, make changes often and lose static carousel links.

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  • What is the difference between a single site and a segmented site? If for instance you look at CNN.com, you have WORLD US ASIA EUROPE Would you consider the way the site to be split by regions as sub sites or one single site..? And Assuming I am right... What is the reason for this? How can I explain to the client?
    – Adam Scot
    Jan 20, 2013 at 20:39
  • @AdamScott Think of the sports section of a regular news site. Thats a single site. Having different sport unions on different sites combined into a sports union site is a segmented site. Each sport union site has its own style.
    – Benny Skogberg
    Jan 20, 2013 at 20:43
  • @AdamScott CNN is a good example of a single site (with a single goal = putting news first)
    – Benny Skogberg
    Jan 20, 2013 at 20:48

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