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!