New Home

The folks at FBREF.com asked me to take a look at their homepage. Their existing homepage (seen in the attachments) is text heavy and simply reflects that it was listing the data they were adding in their incremental updates. Site founder Sean Forman asked for a homepage that made it look like it was a site that was updated multiple times per day with new statistics.

It was also desirable for me to adhere to patterns used on the existing sites in the Sports-Reference family, such as Baseball-Reference and Basketball-Reference.

The biggest difference between FBREF and these other sites is that it is a home for MULTIPLE leagues rather than just a single league. Baseball-Reference has MLB (and minor leagues, in a different area of the site). FBREF has the Premier League and four more leagues in England alone. There's three US leagues, three German leagues, a couple in Spain… all the way to Australia, Mexico, and the Netherlands. And it's going to keep growing, eventually displaying leagues from Cyprus to Gibraltar.

This first attempt shows a home page widget for each country the site covers. It shows the top six teams in the top division table as well as the league leaders in key stats. The photos are the top three goal scorers, the assist leader, and the clean sheet leader (among goalkeepers).

Next, I'll start thinking of ways to present scores as a part of this…