Changes Made to NASCAR’s Website and My NASCAR Page

NASCARAt the beginning of this month, NASCAR changed their website design which necessitated making some changes on my own NASCAR page. First, it seems that NASCAR has removed their RSS News feeds from the site as those are no longer working. As such, I’ve had to remove the NASCAR News headlines and excerpts from my page for now. There might be some way to get the main stories by parsing the website itself or I may have to use another online source that has an RSS feed that I can parse without much code modification.

I have also corrected the links that referenced Dale Jr, Tony Stewart, Mark Martin, and Danica Patrick’s pages on the NASCAR website. The ones in the Drivers Standings list are still pointing to the old pages, which do get re-directed; however, I am not going to correct those as I suspect I’ll have to completely change how I’m getting the standings once the 2013 season starts. In fact my links to the Drivers Standings now go to 404 error pages. The only reason I’m able to get the 2012 standings is that I was getting them based off the server’s IP address which looks to still be active and has the old website content. The current NASCAR Standings page’s content is now completely generated via JavaScript in the browser which means my current method of getting the standings will not work at all. ๐Ÿ™

Given the above, my overall opinion about the changes to the NASCAR website is not going to be very objective right now. It seems to me the overall design is putting emphasis on it being viewed with a smartphone or tablet with a small screen and not necessarily on a PC with a large viewing area. Everything is huge and there so much wasted space. The front page is consumed by a 1280×530 image at the top and if I enable ads on the page the only thing I see on the front page is a banner ad and that large rotating image banner. OK, I do see the navigation menus at the top, but I have to hit Page Down twelve times to see all the content. Granted, it’s ten Page Downs on my blog but I’m showing complete article content.

Anyway, I’ll have to wait and see what happens on the site during and after the Daytona 500 races to really give my final thoughts on the changes and work on getting the 2013 Driver Standings. ๐Ÿ˜•

4 thoughts on “Changes Made to NASCAR’s Website and My NASCAR Page

  1. James Watson

    I agree wholeheartedly about the new nascar.com. What an abomination, and even on mobile it’s not that good. It’s like they decided to use every fancy whiz-bang javascript and html5 trick that they could, but then forgot why people use the site in the first place. Right now, one week before the Daytona 500, none of their banner pictures have the actual Daytona 500 date and time on them, and you either have to click the schedule portion and wait for that page to load, or scroll down a million miles. Ohh, and they didn’t optimize anything – I went to view source on their front page and was greeted by 13788 lines of html. That is not mobile optimized or desktop optimized.

    Anyway, I found your site while looking for who actually created the new site. I heard that they took it back from turner media, but am not sure if they did it internally or hired another firm. Any leads on that?

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  2. Mark Headrick Post author

    Regardless of the actual developer(s) that coded the site, the NASCAR bigwigs told them what to do and gave their stamp of approval. But yeah, there are 6 blank lines in the source code before the DOCTYPE tag which should always be on the first line. Kind of glad I cancelled my RaceView subscription before it would have automatically renewed on February 15th. If I do renew it again, it would only be for the audio/scanner version. We’ll see.

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  3. James Watson

    Well, if you are a web developer, I feel it is in your job description to educate and “manage” up the people who are telling you what to do. Because chances are, the big wigs are busy and don’t really have time to give full thought to the process, and the people they hire are the experts.

    I just rechecked the main sprint cup page – of the 13,788 lines of html, 8000 -ish are blank.

    Anyway, I did just subscribe to the mobile app scanner radio thing, we’ll see how that works out.

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  4. Bill Webb

    I submitted a trouble ticket asking why the site still isn’t updated two days after the Daytona 500. The Nascar webpage is organized in a manner that takes about 2-3 minutes just to find the current standings. As of this minute if you want to know the 2012 points standing you’re in good luck. Hate the page I can’t think of a less user friendly site.

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