Avs Talk - A Colorado Avalanche Blog

I follow Elliotte Friedman on Twitter, along with many other fine CBC folks, and I enjoy the content they provide. Friedman recently posted a blog entry on the Dany Heatley trade, twitted about it and so I journeyed over to check it out.

But as soon as I got there, I shook my head. Not at the content, but at what I consider a failure of the design of the CBC Sports Blog.

A blog - and all websites for that matter - are about content. In fact the most common mantra you'll hear in the web game is "Content is king." But CBC either didn't get the memo, didn't spend enough time on the user experience, or just didn't care.

Check out the story for yourself and tell me what your eye is drawn to first.

Done?

Now be honest, was it the content that drew your eye or was it Friedman's bio, which is the only part of the content area that contains a photo. And an unnecessarily large photo at that.

Friedman's mug was continually in my line of sight while reading the first couple paragraphs and I had to actively keep my eye from tracking over there. That is the exact opposite of how you should be guiding your visitors.

There are many ways to fix that including shrinking the mug shot, removing it entirely, shrinking the width of the right column, adding a photo to the article, shrinking the amount of bio text or any sort of combo of those.

It's just not good enough from the CBC web folks. They should know better.