I do a lot of user experience and usability testing in my profession. I have noticed a few things in my career that I see on this site:

1. When something LOOKS like an ad, people will skip over it. With the ads on this site, some of the content on the right - like the diaries - look like extensions of those ads so people are more likely to pass over them than previously.
2. Navigation must be consistent. The search appears in different sections of the page depending on where you’re at. Information retrieval for a site like this is a must and until hunting around the page, I cannot always find where the search is.
3. Speaking of information retrieval, after doing a search, the result are cumbersome to sort through. By showing the entire story, it makes quickly hunting through results a longer task than it should be.

Those are just a couple things off the top of my head. I am wondering what an eye tracking test would produce. It would probably show some good information for what the “hot spots” on the site are and what might need some optimization.

I replied to someone else before I saw your note.

us older guys can’t read the site. Fonts are way to small.

I’m one of the guys who sorta disappeared after the switch (not that I was the most frequent poster before). A lot of it is real-life stuff keeping me busy, but much of it is that, and I mean no offense, I really hate the new interface. I like a lot of the actual functionality, like recommended diaries, a picture section, and the increased customizeability of the display, but the layout misses on bunch of small things that add up to make it very unpleasant to use. As long as we’ve got a forum for it, I’ll list my grievances (apologies for overlap, I’m trying not to repeat what others have said). These are in no particular order of importance:
1)Color Scheme—It seems like a minor thing, but it matters: green, blue, and grey is just not very baseball-y. I rather liked the old tan/off-white scheme, but if you need to change I recommend lighter colors for the backgrounds (not just the text areas, but the sidebars and such) with trim in red and/or blue.

The use of dark colors for parts of the background with white background for the text is just visually jarring. That level of contrast needs to be toned way down.

2)Ad Placement—When I look at my monitor my eyes naturally fall about 1/4 from the top (I’m on a wide-screen 17” laptop usually). On the front page this is squarely where some irritating ad banner is (or a white box with adblock on). It actually took me a few days before I realized where the title of the damn blog actually is. Ads naturally repulse most people; if it’s the first thing they see they’re going to be turned off. Simply flipping the location of the main title and upper ad banner would go a long way. Also, the title “Minor League Ball” needs to be MUCH bigger, and ideally in some catchy font.

2A)Ad Placement and FanPosts - I think this is where the uniform SN blog format does this site injustice. There is only really one regular ‘author’ on this blog, John, and he posts rather infrequently (NOT complaining, just saying - at the highest rate it’s about once a day). Thus the “Recent Posts” thing is kind of useless—if you visit this site once a day you’ve seen most of them many times. To make it worse, immediately underneath that box is an ad box, which actually pushes the FanPosts off screen before scrolling, or at least shoves the top-most one way at the bottom (I’m running 1440×900 resolution, not the highest possible but not exactly low-res either). As the vast majority of this site’s content is user-generated, this is absolutely unacceptable. I’d honestly prefer to just get rid of the “Recent Posts” box and slide the rest up (preferably sticking the right-hand box below the Posts and Shots), but if this is unacceptable, what about just changing the “Recent Posts” to “Recent FanPosts” (either based on creation date/time or most recently commented. I think people would love a box of most recently commented FanPosts)?

Another suggestion—why not put the links underneath the FanPosts/Shots and move all the advertising over to the left column?

3)Tag Placement—as soon as a tag is added there’s a fairly huge box between the Post and the comments. Could this be dynamically sized? E.g. this Post, where the one “sbn2” tag creates over an inch of whitespace between the post and the comments. Why not just make it, you know, the space of one line of text?

Or perhaps it would be better to just put the tags below the comments?

I’m sure I’ll be able to think of more when I’m less hungry. Thanks for your work, and your civility. Like I said, I think the functionality here is better than the old site’s, but the current layout makes it a much less pleasant experience that does honestly diminish my desire to visit.