The MLS web site disaster
2010-04-01 05:50:00
Chris Schlosser needs to be removed from his position as Director of Digital Strategy for MLS. That's the first, and most important, head that should roll based on the disastrous launch of the new MLS web site last week. But I'm not sure MLS should stop there. The failure of the web site project exudes mistakes at every step of the process and every level of the organization, and belies a complete lack of understanding of the digital medium. Nobody has escaped unscathed - not the writers, not the designers, not the tech contractors, and not the jerks in suits who shepherded and enabled such a monumental failure.The problems are so pervasive as to possibly be terminal. I wouldn't be surprised to see MLS struggle through a year of this site before totally ditching "mlssoccer.com" and rebranding with something entirely new. At the very least there will be another redesign in the next couple years. The die has already been cast for this turd.
I don't say any of this lightly. I've been involved in projects like this. I know how mistakes can happen, and how a radical change in web site architecture can create unforeseen issues that need to be dealt with. I'm also acutely aware of the nature of web sites as changing, developing entities. At some point in the future, bugs will be fixed, functionality will be restored, and everyone will get used to the new site.
But what happened with the MLS web site to this point goes far, far beyond the normal hiccups that typically dog tech projects of this nature. It's impossible to go point by point, screen-cap by screen-cap to eviscerate the totality of the new website because I have over 50 screen-caps of problems, and right now that's not counting the stats, players, community, supporters, espanol, mobile, or store sections.
MLSsoccer.com is the one of the worst website redesign rollouts I've seen in years. It represents a lost opportunity and a monumental failure in execution. It exposes the weaknesses of those in charge in the worst way.
And quite frankly, for an organization the stature of MLS, one that relies so heavily on publicity to bridge the gap to profitability, one that is run by marketing professionals, such a misstep is unforgivable and inexcusable.
*****
The Personal
I have a passion for three things outside of the people I love - soccer, the internet, and art, specifically writing. On MLSsoccer, all three of those things have gone horribly, horribly wrong. Surfing through the site for the first time was like watching my dad come home drunk and beat my mom, and the sight sent me into an angry, sick depression for days. It's not a mistake that I haven't done any writing since MLSsoccer debuted. How many ways can I say it? It's clear by looking at the site that absolutely no one involved gave a fuck about it. Any of it.
Sure, some people may have worked hard on the site, particularly tech guys or gals once those involved realized shit wasn't coming together fast enough. And maybe those people knew how fucked up it all was and had no desire to put their name on such a piece of shit. But there weren't enough of them, and they weren't in positions that mattered.
The fact is, the people in charge - the owners, Don Garber, Chris Schlosser, Greg Lalas, RocketFuel Studios, and even Sunil Gulati - didn't care enough about the site to make it good. And so as someone who spends their free time trying to write the best damn soccer site that I can, as someone who stays awake researching and cobbling together the absolute best I can offer, I'm offended. I'm hurt. I'm personally insulted. And oh am I angry.
I know I have my limitations. I use Blogger because it's more efficient, not because it's what I'd choose if I had the time or money to do something else. I do make mistakes here, the site isn't as sexy or active or interesting as it could be, I'm not an SEO rat or a particularly effective social media promoter, believe me, I know. I think about it all the time. Even when I devote my whole day to this site, which hasn't been lately and won't be for a while, it still has weaknesses.
So I work to make up for that by trying to show that I care. I work hard trying to do the best I can. There's enough terrible shit out there as it is. Enough people who build page mills that have the most worthless, dilapidated content you can find. The world doesn't need another soccer blog with low standards.
So when MLS rips out a site that had some true design flaws, but had good stats, good in-depth articles you really couldn't find anywhere else, and most of the information you could want about a team, and replaces it with something that is nowhere close to being as good, I feel disrespected to a high degree. MLS should be leading the pack, not sinking to the level of shit that reminds you of the worst of the soccersphere.
In this piece right here, a piece which will probably end my anonymity, I'm going to explore what went wrong. I don't have any insider information. Just a knowledge of how this stuff generally happens, a way of logically working through the issues, and a reliance on the laxness of others. If some of my necessary speculation rings true, well . . . I leave it to the reader to assess the plausibility of my theories.
Let me emphasize that I have no particular personal ax to grind outside being horrified at what I saw last week. I'm sure people like Chris Schlosser are good folks who tuck their kids in to bed at night and kiss them on the cheek. I have no wish for anyone to lose their paycheck over this.
However, a lot of people should go do things other than what they are doing at this moment. Things they are probably better suited for than web strategy, design or online content delivery.
******
The Professional
Now last October when MLS announced they were bringing their websites in-house, I was excited. It seemed like a good idea. Teams like Seattle and DC United had been opting out of the MLS template and had indeed delivered some more interesting content. Kansas City's design for their blog Hillcrest Road was an absolute stunner, fit to be mentioned with the best visual design on the web. It seemed like the league as a whole was on the verge of getting it. And then MLS put Chris Schlosser in charge of the league site redesign.
Schlosser's background isn't exactly steeped in web development or brand building. Before he came to MLS, and when he first arrived at the league, he was an internet ad salesman. He interned at malware/advertisement mashup specialists DoubleClick when he was in college before moving on to work as a advertising sales coordinator, account manager, and finally a project manager for global sales strategy at MSN, Microsoft's network of content sites. I don't have his job position in front of me, but if it approximated the level of the project manager position at Microsoft Services, then it wasn't all that high level a position.
So why did MLS tout him as a Microsoft "executive" in a press release to AdWeek when he was hired to sell ads for Soccer United Marketing?
Schlosser, a former Microsoft executive, will be responsible for creating revenue opportunities for Soccer United Marketing, the league's marketing arm, said Dan Courtemanche, svp, marketing and communications for both MLS and SUM.
Schlosser's mandate is to fashion sales strategy so that the league can go to the advertising community with a streamlined portfolio of media assets.
. . .
New York-based Schlosser most recently was project manager of MSN global sales strategy, leading a 25-person internal and external consulting team in restructuring MSN's international ad sales organization. He began his four-year tenure as a sales planner for MSN Financial Services and was then promoted to national account manager.
Although a 25 person team [at Microsoft -Ed.] is nothing to sneeze at, given Schlosser's background, age, and title as "project manager" it seems a real stretch to claim Schlosser was a Microsoft "executive." He certainly wasn't a senior executive. Furthermore, in a 2009 interview with Footiebusiness, Schlosser admited that he got the MLS position because he "formed a relationship with Sunil Gulati." I'm going to take a wild guess and say that since he was taking classes for his MBA at Columbia, he was probably one of Gulati's students.
Ok, there's some serious nepotism right off the bat, but so long as Schlosser did a decent job selling ads for SUM, no harm, no foul, except to MLS's now worthless equal opportunity employment policy, right? But how does a guy who was brought in develop a strategy for selling ad slots on SUM web properties to advertisers end up in control of redesigning the web site? It's here where things get fuzzy and we have to speculate as to how the process might have worked.
After the decision was made to bring MLSnet in-house, I'm guessing that they looked around for someone to lead the project, someone who they already knew. And they found Schlosser, a guy who had been selling ads on the internet (check), had worked as a project manager (check, regardless of what that did or didn't entail), and had worked for Microsoft (check, they know lots about the interwebs!!). So sometime between getting hired as "online advertising director" in September 2008 and the lead up to the season in March 2009, Schlosser became the MLS Director of Digital Marketing.
And that, my friends, is the best scenario I can come up with for how a former business graduate student with very little experience in anything other than selling advertising is put in charge of rolling out the new MLS website after having had Sunil Gulati in class. My charge is that his lack of experience with web development, social media, and brand management left him woefully out of his depth in putting together a worthy successor to MLSnet.
Not only is there very little in Schlosser's background to suggest he was in anyway capable of leading this project, there's ancillary evidence to back up the point. Amanda Vandervort is the social media and web bad-ass who has had a hand in WPS absolutely trouncing MLS in the twitterverse (I'd say ten times as many twitter followers as MLS with a much smaller fanbase and traditional media footprint counts as a trouncing). When Vandervort posted her recap of a soccer social media panel that she and Schlosser participated in last November, I didn't give it much thought. In hindsight, the clues to Schlosser's ineptitude were all right there:
But while I learned a lot about the future of the MLS digital strategy at Tweet, but I didn't learn very much about the tactics their employees currently undertake. I don't want to make assumptions, so can anybody reading this help clarify here? Are employees encouraged to interact with the MLS or teams' fans? There are a few MLS teams who have built social sites – like the Houston Dynamo, for example. But this seems to be the team's initiative, with little more than the league's moral support. I tend to get my MLS news from other fans. Perhaps that IS the MLS social strategy? I really don't know and would love some insight here.
When I first read this, my assumption was that there was some kind of coherent strategy that Vandervort didn't touch on. Now I think that if Vandervort didn't understand what MLS was doing in the social arena, I doubt Schlosser or anyone else did, either. And her other post on the meeting was even more foreboding:
In a powerful discussion between Chris Schlosser and Greg Lalas, Chris said that mlsnet.com must think and act like a digital media company and measure success against others in that space. Interesting.
I'll revisit this statement a bit later.
I want to be clear that Amanda wasn't slagging on Chris in either of these posts. She was very nice about things. But I'm bringing up the absence of a real league social media strategy to show that he was probably out of touch with what it would take to pull off something like MLSsoccer.com.
*******
The Technical
While work presumably happened before then (ahem), the web site transition was officially announced in October 2009. Actually, I've read enough conflicting, second-hand information that I'm not entirely clear on whether there actually *was* work on the new web site before that time. Executives are legendary for underestimating the amount of time and expertise a web project will take. I'm sure there's a universe where the call gets made to cut bait in September, the press release gets sent out in October, and the project jumps off from there.
What we do know is that Microsoft was making presentations to the MLS board near the end of November, major job openings weren't posted until early December, and they didn't get the initial launch schedules from the developers until January.
I also know that 5 months is not nearly enough time to successfully pull off a project the size of MLSsoccer once you pick the technology, no matter how good your team is or how much money you throw at it. Even if there was a savvy, skilled team at the helm here, which there wasn't, I think the timeline was quite aggressive. The maxim about adding more engineers to a project not making it go faster or better applies especially to website projects.
What I think happened is that there were some very high level strategic meetings that took place from March to October 2009. A couple complaints like, "Our design looks old! We need a new one!" and "Our video player sucks! We need a new one!" were thrown out. Maybe some exploratory meetings took place with potential contractors or third parties. And then the *real* work started in the fall. If anyone from MLS wants to stop by and claim that, no, serious stuff was happening back in July, well, that just makes the project an even bigger failure, doesn't it?
At any rate, under Schlosser's direction MLSsoccer.com was actually developed as two separate, poorly integrated web projects that live on their own subdomains and servers. News and other content is wrapped into www.mlssoccer.com, which is hosted by MLS. The video and gameday "experience" lives at mdl.mlssoccer.com, which is hosted by Neulion and shares only a little css with its sister site. It's painfully obvious from the respective server architectures and audience-facing interfaces that these two aspects of the MLS web presence, while conceived in tandem, were designed and implemented by two totally separate teams who had little idea of what the other was doing, and could care even less.
(For the nerds out there who are too lazy to look up the specifics, here you go: www.mlssoccer.com is hosted on MLS's network at 63.241.122.40 and is running Apache 2.2.3/php 5.2.11, while MDL is on a Neulion box at 208.92.36.35, serving static content with Tomcat's Coyote connector.)
A lot has been made of the Silverlight implementation that Neulion has forced on MLS users. So far there have been technical problems upon problems, and as Bill Archer pointed out the gametracker is total ass and a bunch of other cool stuff is missing, too. My personal favorite part of the site is the awesome font on the dropdown that lets you select the "2009-2010" season from the MLS video archives:
It's moldy mom, isn't it?
The point is that Silverlight may be better from a performance perspective than Flash, but the adoption rate is not all that great, and it also happens to not work on one of the most popular mobile platforms. So if you were like me and unable to watch the Saturday matches as they were played, you were forced to refresh BigSoccer and Twitter over a 3G network and hope that someone would throw you a meaningful bone until you got back to a tv.
Meanwhile, Schlosser can go back to his friends at Microsoft and show off a mobile application for a platform consumers can't even buy until later in the year (Windows Mobile 7):
"Microsoft Silverlight technology will be the backbone of the video platform on our newly launched MLSsoccer.com," said Chris Schlosser, director of digital strategy for Major League Soccer. "Our work with Microsoft allows us to launch cutting-edge digital and mobile experiences for our loyal fans. As part of our increased focus on digital media, we view a rich video experience as absolutely critical to accomplishing our goal of ‘super serving' MLS supporters."
MLS's video has always sucked for those who aren't running with the borg, and it's been a pain even for those who were assimilated. MLS was *never* going to make the right technology decision on the streaming video, even if it meant picking a technology that's not found on 40% of internet enable devices (let alone what the penetration rate must be for devices consumers actually, you know, use). Quite frankly, I expected the video to suck, and I'm not all that disappointed that so far it's probably been just as bad as it was before, just bad in different ways. The only difference is the price has gone from being $20 for the whole season to $40 for the regular season, and extra for the playoffs. MLS is clearly counting on generating revenue from their streaming video, but I don't understand why someone would want this over the Direct Kick package, which only costs a little bit more now.
I hope MLS and Neulion suck it up and provide a HTML 5/H.264 solution for those of us who want to follow games on our iphones or don't want to install Silverlight. If Schlosser *really believes* that MLS needs to think and act like a digital media company and measure success against others in that space, then why isn't MLSsoccer on the list of digital media companies that have built iPad-ready sites? I really doubt we'll see anything like that, though. The current website hole is too deep.
One advantage of going with Neulion for the video is that it didn't require any actual technical expertise on the part of MLS. The video portal is a total turn-key solution. It's Neulion's problem if stuff goes wrong, MLS has a support contract, and there's someone they can call up and complain to when things go wrong. Schlosser can sit back, blame them for the problems, and ask how he was supposed to know an award winning company like Neulion would suck so hard.
Such an arrangement does not hold similarly true for the WWW half of the project.
Plenty of others have listed the problems that were (and in some cases still are) evident upon launch. It would be a measure of impossible tedium to recount every single horrifying mistake, so I'm not going to. But I do want to share a few screen shots to give you a flavor of the poor text alignment:
The embarrassing technical issues:
The piss-poor import and date tagging of old news stories:
The inexplicable lack of useful data:
And the bizarrely labeled photo galleries that don't align until you click on one of them:
Not only that, but zero information architecture work was done (12 out of 13 top level links remained the same from MLSnet), most of the new pages are less functional than the ones they replaced, and the font that was chosen for the site is a school project for media design students in Italy. With all the coin they were dropping they couldn't shell out for a decent font face?
So who the fuck put this site together? Wasn't MLS supposed to have hired some crack brand agency who worked with the NHL?
[MLS] has already has hired . . . digital media consultancy Rocket Fuel to advise it during the transition.
Rocket Fuel is headed by former AOL creative chief Michael Wolfson and advised the NHL on its recent redesign.
Right then. So what exactly happened?
Well, first of all, the MLS site design is pretty much ripped off from the NHL:
If you look at the code, the NHL site is probably not using the same platform as what MLS is using, so I suspect transferring and tweaking the css skins was not entirely trivial. Among other issues, on the MLS site there are css files with non-human-readable, apparently dynamically generated names like "css_f5dffefd4ae9c0f0d4c49ea8c58a7933.css". At a glance the markup doesn't look all that terrible, but it's not simple either. With divs having up to 6 class names like "block block-block region-even odd region-count-2 count-13" it's no wonder there have been problems trying to get the layout to work right.
Now, if you want find out more about the consultancy who helped MLS perpetrate this stuff, RocketFuel, good luck. I'm pretty sure this fountain of public information is their website. And I'm pretty sure this guy works for them. In fact, I think he was the overall project manager who handled the WWW part of the MLS site.
How can I say that? Well, he's a senior project manager at Rocket Fuel, and the projects he lists as being part of the firm's background match up with Michael Wolfson's AOL experience (who was noted as having founded RocketFuel in early Sports Business Journal articles on the MLS project). And in that same background this guy lists having worked for the NHL and MLS:
Current and former clients include AOL, CBS Radio, Bonnaroo, True Entertainment, InteractiveOne, the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer.
Our work on NHL.com was nominated for a 2009 Webby Award . . .
I'll bet your work on MLSsoccer won't be nominated for an award. Just a hunch.
So while it's not a slam dunk, 100% possibility that he was point person for the MLS site, I think he had a hand in handling the project. And based on the style of his writing, I think it's very likely that he was the person who penned this desperate sounding job ad on March 14:
We're looking for a ninja Drupal coder... senior level drupal/php developer to work with a team working to clean up and launch a project over the next week. It's a short term project that will last approximately 3 weeks and there is the possibility for a full-time hire later. We are ready to hire you tomorrow and get right to work.
Your ninja skills include...
- Mastery of Drupal (PHP), including custom module and theme development
- JavaScript and jQuery experience
- MySQL, AJAX
- Knowledge of Python or interest in becoming fluent
- CSS and HTML Experience
- Experience integrating with third-party APIs and web services very helpful, but not required
You must be located in NYC and willing to work in our SoHo office.
If you think you've got what it takes, drop us a line and let's talk.
Apply
Email us at info@rocketfuelstudios.com with a link to your work, your rate, and a bit about yourself. We're looking to move fast, fast, fast on this. Like ninjas.
I guess I didn't mention before that www.mlssoccer.com is powered by the Drupal content management system. By March 14, the project was already at least a week late. We all saw how it launched two weeks later. And that part about "interest in becoming fluent" in Python during a three week project? Oh, how I laugh.
And remember in Schlosser's lame apology where he said this:
Specifically, the site is designed to automatically access and integrate a live data feed and this function is not working properly.
That's what the job ad line about "integrating with third-party APIs" refers to. So yeah. I don't think it's ever worked to this point.
At any rate, whoever the guy or gal was who came in to salvage what they could of the project, they had to have found a total mess. If the css code comments are anything to go by, there's some frustration among those who are trying to fix this nightmare:
/* --- CANNOT DO THIS SINCE WE DON'T HAVE THE 26L FONT FAMILY. IT'S NOT AVAILABLE FROM http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/TitilliumText14L -- */
. . .
/* THIS IS MLS NEWS AND IT JUST ISN'T GOING TO FORMAT... TIRED OF TRYING */
Anyway, some dude named "Greg" made a test commit in that file. Greg, if you're the guy slogging through that tangled, horrible mess of CSS I wish you luck. It's not something I'd particularly care to deal with. And if you're the one who was the cause of this overcomplicated, festering code base, then I'm pretty sure you're getting what you deserve right now.
I'm totally willing to buy the excuse that RocketFuel wasn't given enough time to pull things together. But even accounting for that, the execution was still ass. And if the people at MLS were able to tell a screenshot from functioning code, maybe this sort of disaster could have been averted.
The bottom line is that as web projects draw closer to launch, the developers must choose where they will draw the line between things that will get fixed before the launch, and things that will get fixed after launch. And if the order of the day is impending disaster, then they need the flexibility to push that launch date back to save everyone the embarrassment.
Since the project leadership knew or should have known things were not going well at the start of March, they should have made plans to push the launch back at least two months from that point. Or even to the World Cup. Or even after the World Cup. Hell, the video portion could have easily been decoupled from the rest of the site and launched in time for the season while the other stuff was polished up.
While there may have been technical or contractual reasons for both parts of the new site needing to launch before Seattle-Philadelphia, I suspect that since public promises had been made about an awesome new MLS web site being ready for the start of the season, the decision to launch was political. Either no one challenged that plan of attack, or those who did were too weak to make their voice heard. Or hell, maybe RocketFuel was lying about the progress of the site and the MLS people didn't know enough to call them on it. No matter how it happened, it is another failure on the part of MLS management.
The Editorial
I'm already exhausted, but I can't leave without commenting at least a little bit on how disappointing the performance of the editorial staff has been.
What we know is that in November 2009, Shawn Francis was brought on to write the MLS Insider Blog. Then in December, new web content editor job descriptions started showing up around the league. Chivas didn't even post a position for their team site until the end of January. Greg Lalas and Jonah Freedman were not announced as the new MLS editorial staff until February 17. Other positions were filled around the same time. This was only TWO-THREE WEEKS before MLSsoccer was supposed to go online.
I don't care how talented Freedman and Lalas might be. I don't care how many clandestine meetings took place while they were still doing work for their other gigs (it would be interesting to know, though, wouldn't it?). Three weeks is simply not enough time for an editorial staff to pull together the major launch of a new web site. So while I'm willing to give them something of a pass, the time issue comes right back to the unrealistic expectations of the project managers.
But not for everything. While it is perhaps a matter of taste, I hate the new Euro-centric tone of the site. Headlines like "Noonan signs for Seattle" make my stomach churn. And by the way - if you're going to abbreviate Manchester United as "Man Utd" in a headline, there's no period after the "Utd". Hey Greg Lalas, I know it's you making that call since I saw it on Goal.com, too. You're the only one who does that. Scan some New York Times, BBC, and Guardian headlines ktxbye.
I'm also not a fan of the Euro articles cluttering up the front page of the MLS web site. I think they're way too prominent, and detract from why a lot of people go to the site. I can live with the Mexican National Team updates - barely - but I can see why a lot of other MLS fans are going to be pissed.
Furthermore, the website now doesn't rely on articles so much as short blog posts. It looks like the longer pieces are going to be few and far between, and the order of the day is a lot of short pieces. The video is straight up awkward and poorly produced in most cases. I view this as choosing quantity over quality, a strategic move to increase page views but dumb down the content. If that's the choice the editorial team wants to make, go for it, but don't expect me to read all the crap you're trying to shovel through my RSS reader.
How ironic then, that Adam Spangler spent his first post talking about how crappy the short-post style of other bloggers are and how awesome he is:
Every day with [the USMNT] is different and unfit for the hit-and-run approach that is the norm in American soccer journalism. Some of that falls to the tight-lipped voices at play, but there are more questions to ask than can fit into a blog post, podcast, or post-game press conference. I've been charged with covering the national team program, chronicling the growth from the under-17s to the senior side, and all the personalities and predicaments in between. Through investigation, interview, columns, and features, I'm here to toss out a long line and see what I can reel in.
There are millions of underreported stories in the sphere of soccer in this country, but at the end of the day (to borrow the soccer player's favorite qualifier) it all comes back to the men's national team.
There are undoubtedly problems in the American soccerphere. There are bad writers, people who lie, and no one makes money. But if MLS is going to have the audacity to e-mail me and ask for my identity, then maybe it could make sure its own editorial and writing staff have an appreciation for what people like me do. Because according to Spangler, bloggers just aren't good enough to cover the stories that matter. It's not the first time he's said it either.
Or hell, forget about my delicate feelings. At least make sure he's on the same page as your senior editorial crew.
Nevermind that Spangler finished his post with
Now tell me, what is it you want to know?
And nowhere on the page was there a place to contact the author or comment on the article.
Conclusion
The supreme irony in all of this is that MLS's sloppy regard for the web and social media ultimately enabled me to write this post. Today's copy is littered with hypertext pointing at resumes on linkedin, personal web sites, a slowly disintegrating project schedule that was chronicled on twitter updates, a tech job site, and the work of other bloggers. I couldn't have done it without the digital trail left by MLS, its partners, and my companions who are just as passionate about the game and medium as I am.
If you don't care enough or know enough to use social media effectively, it will be your undoing. I just write a silly blog with a couple hundred readers. But if MLS doesn't get its act together, the next time there could be real consequences:
300 emails today, after 1600 last week...my email is literally smoking and my IT guys are ready to throw my mailbox overboard
With a cavalier attitude like that, your mailbox might not be the only thing getting thrown overboard.
Fake Sigi out.
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