on CMLL.com newest look

This post contains zero lucha libre content. You’ve been warned.

Disclaimers
– this website is ugly and I have no legs to stand on (though I’m working on, uh, legs)
– whoever is doing CMLL’s website, it’s not their job to do the website. I mean, I don’t know anything, but I’m guessing if you ranked all the mini jobs in list, it wouldn’t make the top 10
– CMLL.com’s goal deal seems to have a web presence – they’re not trying to do WWE.com, and that’s fine.
– I’m completely evading here, and my foot is about to be planted directly in my mouth

Here’s the thing. I pay way too much attention to these things for a person, let’s note again, who has MULTIPLE badly designed websites. Even if I don’t do it right myself, I am aware of what I’m supposed to be doing.

My main problem with the new CMLL redesign is if you click on “Historia”, you get a construction page and if you click on Lo Nuevo, you get a construction page, and if you click on Camepones, you get a construction page. I don’t want to misrepresent it – everything else goes to a page with content – but three pages are like that, and that’s three pages too many.

You don’t have to have everything up at the start, and it’s kinda better if you don’t, so you can add new things along the way. Planning to add stuff later is different than putting up yet to be finished pages, though. It doesn’t make any sense to promote being not finished with stuff by the time you thought you would. It screams of cutting corners to meet a deadline, and not delivering on that deadline. Given the many occasions pages have been left unfinished or way out of date on CMLL.com, why restart with pages that are already that way? Seeing as the last champions page was never updated, I don’t know why someone should expect this one to get updated – so there’ll be a construction page up for a year or two till the next facelift, and it’ll look very shabby the whole time.

It’s not hard too remove the links to those pages which aren’t up. Do it, and then clean up the extra blank boxes in the menu, the extra blank boxes on the news page, and all the big square boxes where ads haven’t been put up, at least till there are ads. (Those huge square box ads are a huge eye sore, but they’re dead to me once I turn adblock back on.) There’s a lot of other little things which I think can be improved, but if they just fixed that, I’d be so much less annoyed.

Just to balance out, here’s a free suggestion for balance. Pick a page on the website – be it the main page, the news page, or somewhere else – point people towards it and every time you update any thing at all on the website, update that page(. There’s some people like me, who will dutiful check the Arena Coliseo Guadalajara Tuesday Results section every single morning, to see if this is the first time in three weeks it’s been updated. The vast majority of people will not – they’ll check one page, see nothing new, and move on with their lives. If you want to make it worthwhile to put up new content, it needs to be up frequently, consistently, and in a place people will find it. CMLL’s good on the first two, but unless you’re checking the Tuesday Coliseo page on your own, there’s no way you know it’s been updated today. People will find your content, but you’ve got to go the extra mile to get them there.

I’m not saying I could do better, I’m just trying say that the people who do CMLL.com could do better on their own with a little rethinking.

(* – AAA’s site actually does this, but only because of an error in how they’ve set up their website and they’d probably fix it if they knew about it, so I’m not discussing it. AAA’s site and IWRG’s site have their own problems, but I don’t think you want to hear any more about this.)