There are moments you just can’t believe how far we’ve come with technology.
I was sitting at a high school football game Friday night, my team with the game pretty well in hand, when I popped over to LimaScores.com to see the scores of some of the other games.
The site is the newest venture by The Lima News. It takes the depth and breadth of The Lima News’ award-winning sports department and brings it into the current era, where everything is on-demand.
My, what a difference a year makes. We’ve been putting scores on Twitter for years, but the live scoreboard on the site is really something to behold. It’s interesting to reload the page and watch other games progress. And, within an hour of the games ending, I clicked on the word “Final” and saw a completed box score, a good eight hours before I’d normally be able to read it in my paper.
The newspaper put a real emphasis on creating a better website for our sports fans. We know there’s rabid interest in high school sports around here, and we want to continue to be where you go for trusted coverage of sports. We’re supplementing our award-winning photographs and stories from every Saturday with some real-time information on Friday nights.
It’s a learning process, but it’s one that’s well past due. Aside from updating games from Twitter, our Sports department functioned essentially the same way on Friday nights as it did when I worked there 20 years ago, with such an emphasis on getting Saturday’s newspaper out that you didn’t see anything new online between the starts of games and midnight.
We’re also trying to make information we’ve always had internally easier for you to use, including standings, schedules and a calendar of upcoming games. We’re hoping to add rosters early this week.
The end result is something that’s easy to use and endlessly useful for a high school football fan.
This is also the first website we’ve attempted that truly thought about mobile phones first. About half our traffic comes from mobile devices, and we reasoned there are plenty of people sitting at stadiums across the region wondering how their nemesis was doing. The website looks nice on a desktop, too, but it really flies on a phone.
I know I personally learned a lot about the joys of making something work the same on an Apple as it does on an Android phone. On game night, we found a few things don’t look quite perfect on phones, but they’re aesthetic things we can fix by Friday.
The best part is this is just the beginning. We wanted to prove to ourselves the technology wouldn’t let us down, and it survived your abuse on Friday night. We made some tweaks through the first night, addressing a few minor issues we found on our side (like the list of games kept reordering itself) and a few not-so-minor issues (the exact same box score kept popping up, no matter which game you clicked, until we fixed it around 10 p.m.).
We’re proud of what’s online already, but this is a website that’s in progress. We have more ideas of how to make it a useful resource to every fan, but we suspect you have good ideas we haven’t considered yet. What do you like? What could be better? Let me know your thoughts by emailing [email protected] or calling 567-242-0467.
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