Steven Garrity of the talented firm SilverOrange from PEI has a great casual observation on his blog about the troubles the CBC.ca website has had of late…

Design by Disaster on the CBC website

The CBC.ca website has been down or running in a minimal state due to “technical difficulties” for the last two days.
The stripped-down version of the site they put up in the mean time looks better than the full working version.

He has the above screen shot up at his blog, and the CBC.ca site seems to be back running at full bandwidth. I hadn’t seen the CBC.ca site for probably a year, so I don’t know if the site that’s up now was the same as Steve was comparing to, but it brings up a point… good design is as often what you leave out rather than what you add in…

For comparison, here’s the CBC page that’s live as of this posting:

What we’re seeing here is that, by necessity, the CBC launched a simpler site. More content, less interface. This harks back to UIE research that shows that people like information dense websites. Jared’s “Scent of Information” includes some more on this topic, as well as his previous post, Lifestyles of the Link-Rich Home Pages. (Be sure to see the part about McMaster-Carr for something that, as a person with a visual design background, surprised me as effective.) The temporary site is more informationally-dense than the original, while not cluttered. Perhaps this is what subliminally spurred Steven into posting… what struck him as more appealing.

Another thing we speak about around here is “the politics of the homepage.” I have my suspicion (and alas no evidence) that lots of people had their hands in the “design pot,” so to speak, on the regular site, and my guess is that in the “emergency response mode” there was much less bureaucratic oversight. I’m not saying that everyone (or anyone) should throw out their ads and business rules, but when it comes to communicating information on a homepage, these circumstances are ones that may give us pause to think.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.