ABC Blotter- Checking In

The ABC News Blotter was not covered in Michael Massing’s article “The News About the Internet.” Looking back at the website, I don’t think my opinion has changed since the first assignment.

The ABC Blotter homepage has exactly the same format as it did before. There is next to no content. On the first page view, the only content is headings and subheadings. There are no articles. Most of the screen is used for navigation and self-promotion. There should be much more emphasis on content, because it’s worthy content when you can find it.

The latest post on the blog, FBI: Chicago Men Planned Attack Over Danish Cartoon of Prophet, has the same problems as the homepage. There is simply not enough content for a news blog. The only content shown on my 13.3 in. screen, without having to scroll, is a heading and subheading. Over half the screen is used for navigation and advertising. The site really hasn’t changed at all over the weeks, yet I am more annoyed by its inability to feature news and not entertainment videos. These links are sometimes helpful, when they aren’t entertainment clips from The View, but when a person clicks on a link, they expect an article, not unrelated videos.

White Space and frames are still used well and the load time is still the desired 1 sec. using my broadband Internet. However, the extensive use of pictures, advertisements and video clips probably wouldn’t yield the same results on dial-up or DSL Internet. People who use these kinds of Internet would probably become too fed up waiting for the extraneous links and pictures to load to ever see any real content.

The blog definitely has its strong points, but falls short when it comes to content.

There is a large advertisement banner across the screen as well, which takes up more space than any content. I understand they have to pay for the website production somehow, but their priorities seem to be out of whack.

The second screen shot has about 50% content, but the other half of the page is used up by navigation. There are links to other stories. I think this gives the reader too many distractions. They may see a different story on the navigation bar that catches their attention and move on, before even reading any real news. There is simply too much navigation on the ABC News Blotter.

The color scheme makes the text easy to read. The standard black on white keeps it simple so readers aren’t overwhelmed by style decisions. They have the right idea about using simplistic style because it doesn’t take away from the blog’s purpose. People don’t have to drag their cursor over different color texts to figure out what is a link because all links are the standard blue color. To attract more attention, red text is sometimes used on the white background for just a coupls words, not whole blocks of text.