As one of their semi-competitors, albeit an insignificant one, all I can say is "damn". I like the way looking at their site gives you a migraine.

Here's a link to the new beta: http://beta.espn.go.com

By far the most annoying part of ESPN is the auto playing videos. I've found myself going to Yahoo Sports/Deadspin/thebiglead much more frequently because of it.

Yeah, the new site makes it easier to navigate, and emphasizes the top stories much more (which seems to be the goal of most news sites).

(btw, clear your cookies if you want to get out of the beta -- it's "sticky" in that once you visit the beta site you're in the beta)

Yeah the auto playing is a killer. especially when I go there to listen to a podcast and their sports news at the top starts to play making both sounds clash.

Well, I guess the good news is that one still gave me a small headache.

You have to admit though that the redesign is significantly better than the current design.

Yeah that's why I hate it. I hope I can find it and submit some feedback saying "I really hate having to look on more than 1 page to find every sports score ever reported."

It does seem pretty inefficient!

I think the new design is a vast improvement -- also, it serves a legitimate business purpose by letting them serve more than twice as many ads as before on highly trafficked pages.

I actually wrote a blog post on the top 5 improvements of the new design: http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/top-5-improvements-of-...

As one of their competitors, I can say I went into the business in the first place because of ESPN, Yahoo, CBS's, etc. inability to create a usable interface for fans to navigate.