Blog Review
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nba-ball-dont-lie/
The first blog I chose to review was the Ball Don’t Lie blog on Yahoo Sports. This is a NBA blog that does features on every team across the NBA. I’m really impressed with how much content they are posting at this point of the year. Right now, with the NBA in between Free Agency and the Regular-Season Opener, there is not a whole lot to cover but the writers at Ball Don’t Lie are doing in depth previews certain teams and other news stories across the NBA.
I enjoy the layout of the stories on this blog, but I really do not like how they have placed the ads. The articles give a nice two to three paragraph preview and then you can choose if you want to read the full post, or move on. The ads take up a whole third of the screen on the right and are very intrusive.
Every article has a comment section which allows their readers to get more involved with the writers. Most of the writers also link to their Twitter in the byline.
http://www.nba.com/thestarters/
The second blog I looked at was The Starters Blog on nba.com. I checked out this blog because I have watched The Starters TV show and they have mentioned the blog many times on the show.
I like the amount of video content on this blog, but with all of the video content it is almost impossible to find the written articles. I do not like the layout of this blog site. It is essentially the same layout as NBA.com, which is one of the clunkiest and slowest websites on the web.
My favorite part of this blog is their podcast. During the NBA season they do four 30 minute podcasts and one hour long podcasts a week. They do a good job of being informative and entertaining. I would love to do a podcast like this on my own blog.
The Starters interact with their fanbase by talking to them on Twitter, doing polls and even showing pictures of their fans on The Starters TV show.
http://hoopshype.com/category/blog/
The last blog I looked at was the HoopsHype blog from USA Today Sports. For the most part I loved the layout for this blog. There was a trending stories section, an ability to search for stories by each individual team, deep analytics and many more great features for a NBA blog, but as soon as you open the blog there is a giant autoplay video add in the middle of the page. This one ad really takes away from the clean and great layout of this site.
The articles are very well written. The one thing that this blog is missing is just a little video content that would make people get hooked and stay on this page longer. This page has links to all of the writers and a lot of the players social media pages.
