College Basketball: Digital Pac-10 Preview, #3 Washington

Welcome back to our journey through the Pac-10, from a digital point of view.

So far our journey through the conference has shown us #10 USC , #9 Arizona State, and #8 Arizona, #7 Oregon State, #6 Washington State, #5 UCLA, and #4 California.

The three that remain are fantastic. It's a tough showdown. But let's get to it.

#3 Washington

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Fantastic call outs for just about every way to keep in touch imaginable (blog, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, photos). Good attitude through the site.

Weaknesses: Not much basketball depth, info about coach Romar, nor history of the program.

Full Scouting Report:
Clicking into the UW athletics site - GoHuskies.com, here, and you get hit with a fantastic arrangement of icons. There's something nice about the sport icons across the top of the page, and of course there's something nice about the ways to follow UW in those icons to the right... which I'll go into first.



First up, YouTube. I have to admit, clicking on this button (or here) was pretty nice. UW does a solid job of branding and you get a feel that you aren't simply on any old YouTube channel when you click in. I even like the tag, the U-Dub on You Tube.



They don't stop here. Scrolling down on that page (or this one) shows you playlists - right here. It's pretty easy to check out the Husky Men's Hoops videos, sign up to get more, and share them. Plus the videos themselves are really good, behind the scenes content. Overall, really solid.



On to Twitter, shown below and in this link. UW has just north of 4,000 followers. They are also following over 4,000 individuals and there's really no way to use that as a way to explore UW. So while they do a nice job keeping this updated, they miss that chance to help you navigate through the world of Twitter.


Clicking on the photo icon takes you here - you're able to check out various UW galleries, by sport. It's pretty basic, but few do this and it is actually kind of cool.



Moving back to the home page navigation, you see a pretty prominent button for Blogs, referred to as "Dawg Blawg." When you click into the blog, you are able to then filter it by sport. So it is a little manual, but you can get to the point where you're actually looking at hoops only. (Or just click here.)

I moved on to the basketball section now, shown below. Note the icons remain constant in the upper right (but sadly they don't take you to all basketball content -- that'd be amazing!)


Clicking on recruiting takes you here, to a pretty general take on the UW campus. Nothing to see here. Move right along...


Then I clicked on History. I was hoping for something solid here -- they've been to the Dance 14 times and graduated Brandon Roy recently... making for a nice opportunity to storytell about the program... but this is what lied beneath. I guess it is informative.


So UW has a great site. The opportunities are there to make it best in class if they could do two things: 1) leverage those icons in the upper right hand side with Hoops Specific content - whether it be a UW Basketball twitter feed or one from Coach Romar and 2) continue what they've started and communicate that Dawg branding in the voice of basketball. What it means to play for Romar, and what that'd mean for you as a potential student athlete.

Thanks for reading. Come back next week as we wrap up the Pac-10 with the final two programs!

Andy