Dear MLS, get your act together

OK, I am by no means an expert on everything but I do spend my work day as a person who builds and maintains intranets sites for a international company, I spend my off time blogging and online looking for more and better content about RSL and MLS.  I was excited to hear that MLS was going to change the way they do their website, and to also give more control over content to the local teams.

However, what was launched last week and is still up is an embarrassment to the league, unstructured, unorganized, and not current is what you have given fans.  You never should have launched the site unless you were ready, the web is a very unforgiving place and after making good progress with the "mls insider" blog you have taken huge steps back. 

When as a fan I can't even see the scores from the weekends matches on Monday (36 full hours after the last match), well you have in the proper verbiage of the web "EPIC FAIL"  OH sure I can navigate via your flash slideshow, or look at each individual article, but I can't scroll using your schedule of matches at the top of the screen (which if your going to have an arrow for navigation-have something to navigate to), I can't go to the schedule and see updated scores, I have to use horrible drop downs to open up to see most information.

If I look at the Standings they are updated but nothing about goals for or against, home or away, the very basic things that fans have grown used to, and that those who cover your sport and league need to know.  I was disappointed that there was no way to access the game guides prior to the matches, another thing as a fan I love to read to get background information before a match.

There are simply too many issues to go into, but I think a message to fans is clear, your online store is up and ready to take our money, but the rest of the site is simply no ready and should not have been launched.  So now you have a poor design but informative site from last year that is out of date, and a great design but uninformative site that is still out of date on a majority of its tools.

The web is an unforgiving place, and if I didn't need to use the MLS site for things like game guides and other information, I probably wouldn't be coming back any time soon.  You have a real choice to make, take down the site until it is actually ready and tested (let me know if you need help testing) and us the old site until you actually are ready to launch, or risk losing fans who simply will use other sources of information that do work, and are both user friendly and intuitive.

OFF MY SOAPBOX