The CBC is Canada’s national broadcaster. They recently completely redesigned their website in an effort to make it more accessible and standards-compliant. I decided that this was a perfect opportunity to conduct a fairly thorough website review for this blog, as well as showoff the format of our Free Website Report Cards.

Website Report Card

URL: CBC.ca

Information Architecture

It is an extremely difficult task for large, information-heavy websites such as cbc.ca to effectively allow access to all its content while keeping the site clean and organized. With this latest redesign, they have done a very good job. Some suggestions:

• First of all, the omission of a direct link to the Site Map is a major issue. It appears to have not been switched over to the new design yet, so perhaps a direct link is still coming. That isn’t a good enough excuse however to leave a Site Map out of your footer. Yes, the “CBC.CA Directory” links to the Site Map, but I will get to that…
• The CBC.ca Directory on the homepage has links to absolutely everything you could imagine on the CBC site. From information on renting CBC production facilities to links to each of the CBC Local sites, it’s all there. This seems unnecessary as it just clutters up an overall clean and to-the-point homepage. Simply linking to the individual sections would suffice and simplify the design substantially.
• Weather isn’t on the homepage by default and I feel it definitely should be. Canadians love talking about the weather and I’m sure that’s one of the main reasons why visitors travel to cbc.ca.
• A greater emphasis should be placed on the new Video section of the website. It is still growing and needs to be beefed up, but with more visitors surfing with broadband connections, videos are becoming more and more popular on the web.

Visual Appearance

An information-heavy site, but very clean looking and always relatively easy to find what you are looking for. A few points:

• Font sizes can get pretty small. Even just a minor bump in size could really help with readability.
• The left-side navigation on interior pages is difficult to see. An increase in font-size and contrast would certainly make it much easier to navigate.
• The two very large banner ads are distracting, but they are commonplace and won’t be leaving anytime soon. It should be just a matter of getting used to and accepting them.

Usability

The CBC have really strived to make their website accessible to as many people as possible. They even redesigned for 800×600 screen resolutions. A few points:

• The site doesn’t do too well with styles disabled. Things look a little messy. It’s hard with such a large site to ensure content is acceptable when styles are disabled, but it is possible. Perhaps a little further attention to detail is appropriate here.
• Like mentioned before, some text is a little on the small side.
• The automatic refresh every 600 seconds is an absolutely unnecessary element. Let users decide when they want to view new content. (Is something really happening every 600 seconds anyway?)
• There are some broken links around, but this could be attributed to the not-quite-complete redesign.

Coding

For a site with more individual stylesheets than I have ever seen, it is exceptionally well-coded. Many pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Are there oddities in the code? Are there seemingly millions of divs? Yes, of course, but this is one large site, one that should be commended for coding to standards and leading the way for other large sites to follow in its footsteps.

Overall

The CBC has done an excellent job with their latest redesign. Their sensible architecture, solid coding techniques, and girl-next-door good looks really set this site apart from its competition. There are still some bugs in the design, and it certainly hasn’t been integrated sitewide, but the potential is obviously there.

Compared with the New York Times’ latest redesign, the CBC’s looks distinctly Canadian. A well-executed, no-frills design which will leave all its visitors content. If only we could combine the CBC’s design with the NY Times’ bolder offering, I’m sure we’d have a real winner on our hands. But for now we’ll have to make do with the audacious website to the south, and it’s more practical partner to the north.

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