Friday bore witness to the final act of a ridiculous 5 year saga—Pinkey at Revolution built my Gunnar Roadie. Why is this ridiculous you ask? It’s ridiculous because I bought the frame 5 years ago. It’s also ridiculous because it’s built with parts that’ve seen their 8th birthday. Finally, this entire build is ridiculous because I only needed to buy a chain and some new tires. Everything else I had “in stock”, so to say.

Here’s rundown of components:

• Bontrager carbon cranks
• Bontrager xXx Light fork
• Deda Black Stick post
• Fizik Arionne saddle
• 3t Less stem
• Deda 215 bar
• Bontrager Aero wheelset
• Time RXS Titan pedals
• Shimano Dura-Ace rear derailleur (from Giant)
• Shimano 105 front derailleur
• Shimano 105 Black shifters
• Shimano 105 brakes

Not a bad bunch of parts. Especially since they were sitting in storage.

Christmas in July

Collectively as bike geeks we know the Tour de France heralds the bikes and gear available on the shelves for the upcoming season. The latest and greatest is lacquered upon the riders and paraded around the “hexagon” (Paul-ism) of France. Well, usually the latest and the greatest.

This year’s product WTF moment came when we finally got our eyes on what we heard was a new helmet from Giro named the ProLight. Oooh, it’s both pro level, and it’s light. But damned if this helmet turned out to look like something I’d sell to someone buying their first hybrid. Or a triathlete.

It’s visage sparked something though. Something deep within the recesses of my product addled mind. The Giro Boreas. That was the hot helmet in the late 90′s, up until the 2000 Tour when the Pneumo was introduced.

So I wondered if Giro regressed so much even the Boreas looked more technologically advanced than the ProLight. Unfortunately I was right, and I could’ve stopped there. Just saying that Giro released a helmet that looks worse than a helmet they sold in 1999 should’ve been damning enough. But I’m a bigger **** than that. I had to go for the kill – hit ‘em right in the ol’ Roc Locs. Is there another helmet, that’s so ugly, so painful to look at, that it could potentially kill the ProLight if the two were compared? A tall order you ask? No, and I didn’t have to look outside Giro’s walls for such an insidious shell-top. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Giro Eclipse – literally the only helmet worse looking than the ProLight.

It’s not my imagination either – many of the riders looked as though they didn’t want to wear it. Pretty sure Popo never took his Ionos off the entire race. Lance gave it a shot for a few stages as well as Contador, but it was result was inevitable. The normally product-pimping peloton was definitely not ringing the endorsement bell on this one.

Put me down for – none!

What I miss now is having the reps sell me on the product at Interbike. Some of the cooler ones were able to poke fun at some of their products telling me what I already knew: “You don’t want this one!” Then there were the über-reps with their heads up their asses spitting the company propaganda verbatim. Needless to say they didn’t get big orders. Luckily those insurance salesman were repping **** products/companies anyway so it never hurt us.

At this rate we’ll see this as the top of the line offering in a couple of years!

Annnnd…

To be honest, the helmet doesn’t look that bad. It cuts a decent side profile. You just won’t see it on my head. Crap – what am I saying? I’m the person who defended this helmet purchase years ago. I can’t be trusted for any cycling fashion tips after that debacle.

Finally, if any of you, “Who cares what it looks like, I’ll be passing you while you’re looking in the mirror…” douchebags want to comment go right ahead. Pass me and go join the freak-peloton with: shirtless melanoma man, bibs over cotton t-shirt dude, mismatched pro-kit ass, the aged helmetless masters prima-donna, Cat3 pack-meat race-face wad, fairing-using rocket recumbant man, and the countless hordes wearing their 10 year old helmets backwards. You all deserve each other.

That being said, the first time wife looked at the original (old) site all she could say was, “What the **** is that?!” For a newcomer it was a disaster. There was TOO much information on that front page and it was all up in your grill. To grow their following and unique visits they eventually had to break out of a layout/interface that hasn’t really changed since Cyclingnews started.

So here we are with Future Publishing’s redesigned Cyclingnews website. Future Publishing acquired Cyclingnews from Knapp Communications in July of 2007. Longtime fans of CN have been holding their collective breaths that this day would never come but it’s here, so let’s take a look:

1. It’s ugly. Period.

It looks as though they tried to keep the colors of the previous site (not much) and mash it together with their sister-site BikeRadar.com. It looks like a rainy off-season day. Yay! They’ve taken a vibrant world sport and slapped a fresh coat of monotone ass on it. When they actually used color its ends up being the background, which is also atrocious! The text is obscured on a 15″ laptop screen and the image is HORRIFICALLY faded into white. Just get rid of it. It serves no purpose while being detrimental to the overall appearance. I’m sure I’ll hit the color scheme some more down this list.

2. The dynamic content box is Flash. And it’s ugly.

I don’t get why people think it’s a good idea to create content sliders/galleries/whatever in Flash. It has to be installed in the viewer’s browser. If it’s not, then they see nothing but a notice that they need to download the Flash player. If it was coded in a JavaScript library like jQuery then it has WAY more chance of reaching the viewer. Even if they have JS turned off, the slider degrades gracefully into the unordered list it was created with. The viewer still sees the content. That would be a good thing.

Adding to the visual mud is a “technique” that the designers first used on BikeRadar. To separate the links/text on the left from the images on the right, they’ve used another muddled fade/transition. Just make the separator a clean line so it doesn’t look like you’re using Photoshop for the first time. Or make the background of the text dark enough that it pops out from the image. Simple and clean.

3. Typography? What typography?

If you’re going to make a change for the “better” then you have to cover everything. While the structure of the home page promotes a visual/content hierarchy the typo does not. They use more gray as background to section headers which does its job decently. But the font size is only 2 pixels larger than the body copy or race information. When you reach the individual race headers you can’t make them noticeably smaller than the section header since that’s already minuscule. Granted they are a different color and set in bold but the purple used is almost gray.

As a magazine style layout the type should be set to display clear delineations between section headers, paragraph titles and copy. This site does not go far enough to make that obvious and dynamic. It in turn makes the content on the home page look similar and uninteresting. To their credit however, they maintained the traditional page structure of a blog post on the article pages. The post title is clearly that since a much larger font in the color black is used.

4. Hooray, there’s a menu! Crap, there’s no usability.

Moving back up the page a little, we have to look at a welcome newcomer to the Cyclingnews.com visual family: a navigation menu. To be fair, a menu did exist before, but do you remember it? Did you ever use it?

So now we have this menu to choose from which is actually a win for them. But they kill it, making it virtually unusable by not including hover-states for the block of the menu. Sure there’s an underline that pops up when you caress it with your pointer, but that’s it. No color change in the text, nor a nice big color change on the background of the menu choice – a common attribute on many website nav bars in the modern era.

5. There are some good things though.

The site desperately needed to be modernized. The problem when making ANY changes to something people use everyday is that people will always complain. Granted there are some fundamental things wrong with this site now, but they were worse before. We were just used to the layout and format. Just because we’re used to something doesn’t mean it’s right or that it works.

The site desperately needed a traditional navigation menu. Now you can filter your news by type of cycling genre. These choices are immediately reflected on the home page with a relative change in the dynamic content box. Before you were dumped into a disastrous link-fest page which you know you balked at the first time you saw it.
Along the lines of the navigation, they’ve also added a nice breadcrumb page link trail to each inner page. That definitely helps your navigation within the inner pages.
As web designer/developer I know the need and value to get viewers deeper into the site. The previous site only catered to our immediate race results cravings. Now you have a multitude of options to experience the vast amount of information that Cyclingnews collects regarding our favorite sport. If you’re a cynic claiming that more pages means more chances to place ads – then you’re right. More ads mean that the site is paid for and will exist for us to complain about. Otherwise, no sponsors, no site. It costs a LOT of money to run a site with this type of daily viewership and its inherent bandwidth needs.

My favorite change to the site is a consistent header with a logo. Rule #1 is to make your logo prominent and most importantly LINKED TO THE HOME PAGE!

Last thought.

Think hard; if you opened a site like the old Cyclingnews today, regardless of the content, would you stay or go? Most likely you’d go to the next suggestion you found on Google. If you prefer the look of the old one simply becuase you don’t like change even if Cyclingnews gets the layout and information access perfected, then enjoy the rest of your life on the net. I feel sorry for you.

In the end I’d classify myself as a firm “meh”. I’ve always wanted CN to redesign the site, I just think the new version needs some tweaking. And a tweaking they will do, otherwise they’ll lose viewership on the most visited cycling news portal on the net.

Disclaimer*

For those about to rock out on this post and call me out on this site’s design – you’re more than welcome. I design and develop sites for a living. This site, however, makes me no money. I have no time to apply any substantial effort into this site. So I’m slowly tailoring this WordPress template by kailoon to suit my needs. I’m allowed to take a break on my own projects don’t you think?

If you’re just here to talk ****, then enjoy being that guy. Your family must be proud.