New Location

Thanks for visiting the Sport Management Review. We've moved to a new WordPress site at http://sportmanagementreview.wordpress.com/.

Alternatively, you can use the FeedBurner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/SportManagementReview

New Reviews

Get ready for some new reviews in the near future!

NASSM - North American Society for Sport Management

This week I'm reviewing the NASSM website. This is more of a scholarly website, and not much use unless you are a member of NASSM, which I happen to be a student member.

Aesthetics/Design
The NASSM homepage is a clean white layout, with neutral black, maroon, and blue text that is easy to read. The very simple layout is mainly text-based, with a few photos and graphics. The site also makes use of frames on either side. The left frame is a site contents frame with some links, and the right hand frame has a member login, search, and number of users/guests online. The links are intuitive and easy to find.

Content
I find the content for the NASSM site to be sadly lacking unless you are trying to join or renew membership, or gain information about attending or presenting at one of their conferences. While I'm sure this is a useful function for some, it does not help me out (except for when I was joining). Also available were minutes from Annual General meetings. Information on the Journal of Sport Management is also available, along with the current issue table of contents. However, beyond very basic information, this website is not very useful at all unless you are searching for accredited sport management programs, or student or professional member lists. There are also a few lonely forums for general information, student comments, and one on accreditation. For all the information it seems to have on conferences, I could only find information on the most recent conferences.

Links
I found very few external links on this page. Further links to more academic sport management information would have been vital.

Price
The website itself is free to access, but paid membership is required to access member lists, forums, and other information. I'm okay with this since it is a professional organization and I wouldn't want my information being available to any random person on the internet.

Overall
This is a basic website with some good information if you are just joining or looking for information about NASSM Conferences. Beyond that, I was not very impressed. However, this site was apparently just redesigned and largely improved. Improvement is always good, so I give them points for updating from whatever it was before. Additionally, there is a survey and email link for feedback on improvements, so it is clear that they are striving to become a better website. Bravo to improvement! Let me know when it's ready!

Stay Tuned

Check back soon for a new review. I'm currently reviewing it and will post tomorrow or Thursday.

The Sport Business Education Network: MySpace Profile

So now we come to the second part of the Sport Business Education Network (SBEN)--their MySpace profile. In my last post, I critiqued a lot of the main website for the SBEN, but overall I think they have a great mission and fill the need for networking opportunities for sport business students. I previously reviewed the independent website, today's review will focus on their MySpace profile:

Aesthetics
This is a typical MySpace profile, with default colors. I personally don't like the default colors, but they are the default. The profile picture is still the ugly blue rectangle logo.

Design
Once again, standard MySpace fare. No special layouts or anythingContent--There are two main sources of content for the SBEN's MySpace. First are the comments. As of today there are 252 comments, with most of them being requests for jobs or internships, some are questions about college or grad school, and then there are some opportunities as well. I've never posted a request or opportunity there, so I'm not sure how well this works. If anyone has used it, good or bad results, please comment and let me know. The other main content is their blog, the most recent entries were:

• 2-20-07-Newest sport jobs and internships (view more)

  Sport & Culture in the Global Marketplace Study Abroad Program (view more)

  2-7-07-Newest sport jobs and internships (view more)

  “A Brand Is Like a Living Creature” (view more)

  Conference Announcement (view more)

The job postings in the blog seem to be mostly from www.teamworkonline.com, but they may have listings from NIRSA as well. There are often interesting links to sport management news stories and conferences as well.

Links
As mentioned above, the blog often has interesting links to various sport management websites or news stories.

Price
As they state on their main webpage, SBEN will always be free. As long as MySpace remains free then this aspect of SBEN will be free as well. The only drawback with the site is that a MySpace profile is required to post comments. Additionally, many students do not have the most professional profiles, so as a potential employer I might hold off hiring someone after seeing their drunk night at the beach photo where they lit a beach chair on fire. [As far as I know, there are no profiles with that specific photo on MySpace].

Overall
Overall, I do like this organization. I don't have a MySpace profile, so I haven't done any posting on their comments, and I'd rather network in person. However, I still think this is a great resource for students to look into, and am subscribed to their blog.

Tags: sport networking helpful network myspace blog business education management

Review: The Sport Business Education Network

Today's review is of The Sport Business Education Network, which I found via MySpace. I don't remember how I actually found it on MySpace, just that I was intrigued by the concept of it. Since this organization actually has two pages, their regular webpage and their MySpace profile, I'll be reviewing them separately. Today I'm going to review their regular webpage since they have more control over that than the MySpace profile.

What exactly is The Sport Business Education Network? According to their website, they are " an initiative started by students for students, professors, and professionals," for the purpose of connecting individuals in the sport business world. This is pretty vague, but the website is easy enough to navigate and explore. So let's get on to the categories:

Aesthetics
This is definitely not the most beautiful website that I've ever seen. They only have one graphic on the main webpage, and it is a rectangle with "SBEN" and their tagline of "connecting sport students, professors, and professionals" in the middle of it. My main problem with the graphic are the weird bubbles on it. They just look like the glare that you get if you take a direct photo of the sun or some other bright light. Also, next to the main logo/rectangle, is this weird logo of red eagle and a blue eagle fighting over a baseball in the center of the words "American" and "National". I'm guessing this is some sort of reference to the upcoming baseball season and the date that pitchers and catchers begin spring training, but I've never seen a logo like this before, and it was more confusing than anything else. If they wanted to remind me of baseball, they should stick with the regular MLB logo or something similar. Nothing else of interest with the aesthetics of this page. I'd like to see a more professional looking logo however.

Design
One thing I like about the website is that's it really easy to navigate and the buttons at the top of the page clearly indicate which part of the website you'll be linked to. You can get to the section that you want within 1-2 clicks. Although it was really easy to get around, a site map would still be helpful, though not necessary due to the small size of the website, for those who are new to it.

There are some others things that I would improve upon if possible: 1) More graphics--the site is easy navigate and quick to load, but it is not very visually interesting. Adding some photos of members in exciting jobs or even some image maps would make it a lot more fun to navigate, 2) I don't like the way the blog links to the MySpace profile. This is an abrupt change for the viewer, and I don't like the MySpace blog format at all. While I understand that a lot of members come from the MySpace website, I'd rather see the majority of networking and blogging occurring directly on the SMEN.org website.

Interestingly, when I opened up one of the articles available, the format of the webpage changed. It went from boring white and blue to a nice grey texture background, sidebar links, and a great circle logo in the corner. Once I clicked on further links from this page, most of the previously dull pages (except the homepage) all had this great little design. I'm not sure why the logo isn't on the main webpage, but it should be!

Finally, I'd like to see the website looking more professional overall--cleaner layout, consistent templates, and more graphics.
Content
My favorite aspect of thesmn.org is their resume hosting service. You can email them your resume and they will host it at www.thesmn.org/yourname.doc. Currently my resume is up there as a Microsoft Word document. I'm not sure if they will post .pdf's but I'd love for that to be an option. This is still a great option though because it provides an online home for your resume that employers do not need to login to or search for. All they need to do is type is the short address. I currently have my resume link on my business cards. Note: I've emailed site administrators twice in an attempt to update my resume, but it is still the old one.

In addition to the resume hosting feature, the website has an articles section, sport job links, an award page (list of names), a forum, and links to partners and the blog. There are less than 10 articles, and all of them seem to be from students. While I like this idea, I'd like to see more professional looking and interesting articles; interviewing some top sport management professionals would much improve this section. Although the sport job links page does not have any websites that I didn't already know of, I think it's important for any website of this type to list as many job links as possible. I'm not sure what's going on with the awards page. It lists members of the month, but I don't know how they are chosen or anything further about them than their name. The forum is a great idea, but it doesn't seem to be getting much use. This may be because of most members posting on the MySpace.com comment area. The topic areas seem to be relevant and have potential for great conversations if more people visited them and posted it. I'd recommend that The SBEN publicize their forum more.

I also like the blog, but wish it wasn't on MySpace. The blog provides job listings (garnered from various sport job websites, including teamworkonline.com and others), conference announcements, and general information/news regarding sport management.

Links
There are a not a whole lot of links throughout the webpage, though there are some for job postings, articles, but that's okay, since the focus of this website is on networking for its members. Additionally, the main page provides direct links to the jobs posted in the blog, so that is a great option.

Price
Free! "We pledge to always offer our services free of charge." Even better. With the amount of sport job websites requiring paid memberships, it is comforting to see that not everyone is charging for information.

Overall
I like The SBEN.org overall because of its mission and goals. Although I'm not positive how useful the MySpace comment networking is, the SBEN is a great place to begin your networking and practice those skills and learn more about the sport management field in general. Overall, I'd recommend a more professional design and layout. They have a page of several partners, including Monster.com and gradschools.com, and hopefully could get one of these partners to sponsor a web designer. I think that a more professional looking layout would draw more highly qualified individuals, as well as a larger membership base in general--both of which are beneficial to a networking website.

Check back soon for my review of the SBEN's MySpace profile. And if you thought this was too much reading, I promise it will be shorter!

Welcome to the Sport Management Review

Welcome
Welcome to the Sport Management Review blog. As a sport management grad student, I find myself searching out and reading a large amount of websites related to sport management, sports, and recreation, as well as general business sites. There are many great resources on the web...and some not so great ones as well. My goal with this blog is to review a new website about once a week so that readers can find new sites worth checking out.

Some of the sites I'll review include: general sport management, academic sport management, job search, sport management networks, professional associations, sport businesses, and actual team websites. Make sure that you send me links to any interesting sites and I'll be sure to check them out.

Reviewing Websites
Since I'm a grad student, I try to be semi-organized. When reviewing these websites, there are several areas that I will consider:

• Aesthetics--Is it pretty? First impressions count! While this is not the most important aspect of a website, it will most likely effect the overall rating of a website because I don't like using websites that hurt my eyes or give me headaches.
  

• Design--This is different than aesthetics because I consider aesthetics to be static (for a website at least). The design rating will depend on the ease of navigating the site, and how easy it is to find information and utilize it. It's also somewhat dependent upon aesthetics since if it's ugly I don't consider it good design, but it can be ugly and also hard to navigate.
  

• Content--Okay, a website can be have great design, but that doesn't help it much if the information is useless. The usefulness of information can be debated, and will probably change based on the project, level, and a plethora of other variables, but I will be considering how useful information would be to an advanced student (upperclassmen in college or above) or business professional. Thus (note the student word), if you have a doctoral degree in sport management then the information may not be advanced enough, but if you are in 8th grade, it might be a little bit over your head (but not necessarily!).
  

• Links--Are there any links to further information? I won' t be rating the content of the links, I'll just judge if there are any that look to be useful.
  

• Price--I'm a student, so price is definitely important to me. I won't be thoroughly reviewing any websites that require a fee or paid membership to use. Although I will rate them based on the information that I can access. That being said, a free website will be ranked higher than a paid website with similar ratings in aesthetics, design, and content.
  

• Overall--Finally, I'll be looking for a certain "je ne sais quoi". It will probably be a combination of everything that I've just mentioned, and how it all fits together.
  

The first review will be posted sometime next week. In the meantime, be sure to leave some comments with ideas for other websites, and other methods to rate them.