cleveland blog

Lately I've been thinking about what a terrible site www.cleveland.com is. Anyone else ever post on there? I wonder if they ever did any usability tests on it. It's pretty much unusable from a web 2.0 perspective. I'm surprised if they think this is really an adequate design for their customers. Every time I go there, it makes me not want to go back. I guess the only reason I do is because they have the content, along with a decent user base.

Once you comment on a story, it's pretty hard to find again if it goes off the front page. There is no way of knowing if someone responded to one of your comments. You can't see any of your old posts when you log in. They routinely censor posts... mine have been removed several times. The layout is arranged in such a haphazard manner as to make navigation difficult.

I noticed a lot of other city papers use this same software for their online presence. Newspapers are dying, and thus far they have been unable to compete with advertising dollars online. It's no wonder when they have such pathetic sites like this. Someone really should design some decent interactive software for local news sites. Hmm...