Lizard's Rant


The Official Blog of SportsLizard.com

Archive for August, 2008

Tuff Stuff Raises the Bar

August 21st, 2008

Tuff Stuff launched a “new” website today. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from Tuff Stuff - waaaaay behind the times with lots of sloppiness, confusing navigation, and a progressively worse design. For example, click on the “Shop” link to visit Tuff Stuff’s shop and you’ll be greeted by a web developers best friend: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, aka the text that is used to fill in empty space when doing a web design to get a feel for how the site will look when it’s filled with real text.

Tuff Stuff Site

Note to Tuff Stuff - this is supposed to be gone before you launch the site. Way to raise the bar guys.

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Quick Revamp Update, Thoughts on Beckett’s New Site

August 20th, 2008

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the planet.

I’ve been diligently using my free time to work on revamping SportsLizard. This whole Beckett fiasco (the site sucking, not the fixed box breaks) has only made me put more emphasis on providing a product that’s free, easy to use, and helpful to collectors and to sellers. While the existing SportsLizard is certainly a solid site, the planned revamp with a new look will certainly be ten-fold upgrade in my opinion. With that, I’m pushing back the planned re-launch until mid/late September to give me time to significantly overhaul the price guide (soon to be called “pricing tool”) and to upgrade/improve everything else SportsLizard offers.

While I’m on the topic of Beckett’s new site: I see what they are trying to do. In theory, their approach isn’t a bad one. But in completely changing things around and making the site not very intuitive to it’s masses they pissed a lot of people off. You should never ever ever alienate your existing audience with an upgrade. Telling people to “give it time” or to “watch the tutorials” is retarded - a sports collectibles site shouldn’t need to a tutorial to navigate. If your customers are pushing back as much as the collecting community is, your best bet is to scratch the whole thing, call this “beta” a failure, and go back to the way it used to be. Clean up some of the mess but keep the core functionality the same. The longer you go on with this, the more you will piss people off. Trust me, it won’t get better.

Then again, maybe Beckett screwing up like this is just what the hobby needs to break away from them.

Oh, and if you’re craving a fresh perspective and more frequent updates, swing over to Sports Cards Uncensored - quickly becoming a “must read” for me.

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