College Football Blog Award: Brady Quinn Award for Best Looking Blog

With all the new stuff we seem to try to add to BON, it's a challenge to keep this site navigable and easy enough on the eyes. We only wish we were as clean and pretty as the nominees for this year's "Brady Quinn Award" for the blog that's most aesthetically pleasing, while seamlessly incorporating new technologies.

Those nominees were - in alphabetical order - Bevo Sports, Buckeye Commentary, Men of the Scarley and Gray, Rocky Top Talk, and Trojan Wire.

And the winner is...

Bevo Sports!  Our runner up is Men of the Scarlet and Gray!

Congratulations to Bevo Sports, a most worthy winner. It's not just all that beautiful burnt orange that makes me gush over Bevo Sports, either. Matt and Brian, two good friends of BON, have done an amazing job building an eye-catching, highly navigable, and wonderfully integrated blog.

The main column, where headline stories are posted, is cleverly designed to mimick a football field, bracketed at the top by a 'Texas' end zone and on the bottom by an end zone featuring Texas' most recent opponent. Based on that alone, you'd think Matt were some kind of graphic designer...

(He is.)

On the left side, readers can clearly surf through the site's various features, each conveniently labeled by category or forum type. Readers who prefer to digest their content in RSS readers are easily able to choose the subscription button of their choice in an easy-to-find box.

On the right side of the page, one-sentenced story summaries direct readers to stories of interest for Texas fans without cluttering the content of the main column. The links sections are tailored to Longhorn readers and not excessive in number.

There's a great rule in physics and writing to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. I'd say that's entirely true for design, as well, and Bevo Sports epitomizes that. Congratulations, Matt and Brian!

Our Runner Up, Men of the Scarlet and Gray, is equally outstanding. Another disciple of the simpler-is-better crowd, MOTSAG is crisply laid out without excess clutter. The headline banner is an attractive montage of Buckeye legends that serves as a perfect headline to the site's mission.

Stories in the main column are not just categorized with worded labels - the authors also provide a graphic image at the beginning of the story which serves as notice of the story's content category. Like Bevo Sports, the right column is clean and concise; readers are offered a slew of useful links and site navigation functions, without being burdened by hundreds of links and categories.

Congratulations to each of our nominees, our winner Bevo Sports, and our runner up Men of the Scarlet and Gray!

Next award posting at DawgSports at 4:00 eastern.

--PB--