Pre-Match Preamble – Gameweek 32

So this has been a challenging fortnight.

Rolling out the redesigned site took me back to the summer of 2013, when we first introduced the HomeCrowd comments system. Once again I was pulled away from interacting with the fevered feedback, tied up with the small matter of ensuring that the website stayed on its feet.

Not surprisingly, Fantasy Football has had to take a backseat; in the next hour I’ll look at my team for the first time in almost two weeks.

I’ve had to remain dedicated to pushing the new look over the line, determined to get the site live in the season so that I could gauge reaction and gather feedback ahead of the next campaign.

I was quite prepared for a mixed response. That’s totally understandable amongst a community that had grown so accustomed to an established look and look and feel. I did have concerns about changing things up but, having stood still for five years, I wanted to make a change and modernise.

Ultimately, I had to react to the fact that the profile of our traffic has changed. According to our analytics, half of you are reading this on mobile right now and, on mobile, we were going to lose out on Google – a search engine service which is apparently quite popular.

However, like many of you, for the majority of the time I’m a desktop user. I fully appreciate that building a responsive, mobile friendly design meant that we had to change things up on desktop. I wanted to try to retain a similar layout, add some functionality like the dropdown menu and small things like adding injury doubts to the team news. However, while I’ve had over a year working with this new site, I understand that the change is jarring for all of you.

But this is a starting point. I fully intended to be on the site more in the last few days and offer more reassurance that we are listening to feedback and will be reacting accordingly. Sadly, with stability an issue, I had to concentrate efforts on that – this is why I’m dedicating the Preamble to this week’s change.

Obviously, I don’t intend to revert to the old design. I want to build on what we have now and provide an experience that works well for all.

We’ve increased our hosting costs to ensure we keep stability and that the new site performs well. Now that we seem to have established that, we’re going to start the first wave of tweaks and then work from there. We will look at spacing and fonts, we will restore dates and timestamps where they are missing and we’ll look again at the access to the Season Ticker and Recent Comments on mobile. We’ve already got our first wave of tasks decided.

Plus, I fully intend to iterate on what you see over the summer, when we’re not distracted by the Gameweek cycle. I’m confident we can make the new FFS work for all and provide an even better site to the old pair of slippers we found so comfortable.

So many of you have offered feedback and, despite issues for some, our traffic has not suffered the dip normally associated with new designs. I thank you for your patience and loyalty and if you have further feedback, please mail us at support@fantasyfootballscout.co.uk so we can go on building our tasklist.

I’m realistic in thinking that we won’t be able to please everyone but I hope that you’ll settle in the new surrounds and that we can do one or two things to help that process.

For now, I’m going to fire up my team and do what so many of you have done throughout the last couple of days – get back to the football and the real job at hand.