I am trying to plan out what my 2022 rankings will look like and would appreciate your feedback. My 2021 final rankings can be viewed here.
The pros and cons of the website format, in my eyes:
Pros:
I got to build the whole website and all the necessary processes (player card builder, input spreadsheet, etc) from scratch. Doing so made me feel very smart and I learned how to do a lot of things with R and HTML/CSS in the process.
I think it looks very clean and is pretty easy to read. If I had published the rankings here on Substack, I would have to insert an image of each player card which might require zooming to read.
I was able to build everything to suit my needs and didn’t have to worry about my platform disrupting my plans (I didn’t have to worry about breaking the rankings up into multiple Substack posts because of excessive word/clip count, for example).
Cons:
Some of the media does not always load in properly. Prime example: the image on the homepage that is supposed to display the full rankings is broken. Probably not the greatest showcase of the content that follows it. Some of the clips in a player’s profile may not load properly as well.
There are some weird characters in some spots (i.e. “Guenther’s”). This is a result of me typing up all the profiles in Google Docs, then pasting them into a spreadsheet, then having a program pull that info out of that spreadsheet and input it into RMarkdown. There were a lot more of those occurrences at first; I eliminated most of them.
The site is extremely barebones and I’m not entirely sure how well it performed for everyone.
So, based upon that, some questions that I have:
Should I continue with this type of website format? I am confident that I can eliminate the silly disruptive issues like media not loading and the funny characters. Should I return to a more basic format like Substack or Wordpress? Should I look into switching to an e-book type format, like this (I believe I can still insert GIFs into this format)? Any other platform suggestions?
How is the level of information provided? Not enough? Too much? Just right? I try to get more detailed every year, so this upcoming year will probably have even more unless feedback dictates otherwise.
I try to include lots of video clips to illustrate some of what I’m talking about. Is that helpful? Do people watch them? Should I spend more time discussing the clips and exactly what is occuring, or just provide them as more of a complement to the discussion already present?
What elements of the writeups are most useful and which are least useful? Are the strength/weakness breakdowns in the player cards something that people enjoy? What about the ‘One Thing I Love’, ‘Swing Skill’, ‘Development’, ‘Projection’, and ‘Methodology’ headers? Should I remove one or more of these? Should I add more headers?
Any other suggestions on how I can improve the rankings?
Really appreciate any feedback. If you’re viewing this by email, you can respond to this email and I should receive it. You can also reply to this Substack thread or reach me on Twitter.
Rankings Format Plan/Feedback
Rankings Format Plan/Feedback
Rankings Format Plan/Feedback
I am trying to plan out what my 2022 rankings will look like and would appreciate your feedback. My 2021 final rankings can be viewed here.
The pros and cons of the website format, in my eyes:
Pros:
I got to build the whole website and all the necessary processes (player card builder, input spreadsheet, etc) from scratch. Doing so made me feel very smart and I learned how to do a lot of things with R and HTML/CSS in the process.
I think it looks very clean and is pretty easy to read. If I had published the rankings here on Substack, I would have to insert an image of each player card which might require zooming to read.
I was able to build everything to suit my needs and didn’t have to worry about my platform disrupting my plans (I didn’t have to worry about breaking the rankings up into multiple Substack posts because of excessive word/clip count, for example).
Cons:
Some of the media does not always load in properly. Prime example: the image on the homepage that is supposed to display the full rankings is broken. Probably not the greatest showcase of the content that follows it. Some of the clips in a player’s profile may not load properly as well.
There are some weird characters in some spots (i.e. “Guenther’s”). This is a result of me typing up all the profiles in Google Docs, then pasting them into a spreadsheet, then having a program pull that info out of that spreadsheet and input it into RMarkdown. There were a lot more of those occurrences at first; I eliminated most of them.
The site is extremely barebones and I’m not entirely sure how well it performed for everyone.
So, based upon that, some questions that I have:
Should I continue with this type of website format? I am confident that I can eliminate the silly disruptive issues like media not loading and the funny characters. Should I return to a more basic format like Substack or Wordpress? Should I look into switching to an e-book type format, like this (I believe I can still insert GIFs into this format)? Any other platform suggestions?
How is the level of information provided? Not enough? Too much? Just right? I try to get more detailed every year, so this upcoming year will probably have even more unless feedback dictates otherwise.
I try to include lots of video clips to illustrate some of what I’m talking about. Is that helpful? Do people watch them? Should I spend more time discussing the clips and exactly what is occuring, or just provide them as more of a complement to the discussion already present?
What elements of the writeups are most useful and which are least useful? Are the strength/weakness breakdowns in the player cards something that people enjoy? What about the ‘One Thing I Love’, ‘Swing Skill’, ‘Development’, ‘Projection’, and ‘Methodology’ headers? Should I remove one or more of these? Should I add more headers?
Any other suggestions on how I can improve the rankings?
Really appreciate any feedback. If you’re viewing this by email, you can respond to this email and I should receive it. You can also reply to this Substack thread or reach me on Twitter.