Less links, more description, better navigation. Make it intuitive to find what you want without having to just dump it all out immediately when a user gets to the site. Better yet, and craigslist is ideally suited to this, let the user choose how they want it laid out. Clever use of AJAX and CSS would allow for a super-small footprint while meeting the needs of both new and old users. This doesn’t even get into things like adding features for browsing/searching multiple communities at a time, etc. A change like this would facillitate monetizing more services, perhaps building garage sales into a more feature rich area that can offer for pay services.

You may be able to tell that I think craigslist is a woefully underutilized resource…

Firstly, the section on the right, “Discussion Forums” uses a table for 2 columns… I’m guessing because of lazyness. Who knows.

Secondly, the calendar (IMHO appropriate as a table) is not coded to be accessible.

So.. I hope that clears it up my initial post.

I still stand by my statement that its a rough proof of concept.

Fix the 2 points I’ve brought up, and it will be much closer to awesome :)

In my view, if you are willing to go and present something to the masses for accessibility and best practices, you should try to build it as close to 100% awesome as you can. (and tweak it after feedback).

The list is very successful. That success began when the web was still in the text only mode and no one can truely define the hit in users that would be incured with a change. There would be a hit. People, users as people, are familiar with the format, know the look, trust the list admins.

If a change is to be made in craigslist, mover carefully.

That of course nullifies the CSS advantage over tables : easy and lightweight presentation management.

Plus, if the table is coded in an accessible way (using summaries, captions, ids for headers etc) is not THAT bad, on the contrary, it serves its initial purpose.

James, you’re missing the point. It was never a rebranding exercise (or is that just a branding exercise, since CL doesn’t really have a consciously designed brand ATM). The task was simply to prove the current info architecture could be significantly and inexpensively improved by simply getting the basics of layout, color and type right.

Branding is an expensive question all to itself.

I think your design is quite good and should serve as inspiration to the Craig’s List people to do something about their site’s look. Maybe they could even have a contest for the best redesign of their site.

Don’t let the jerks who posted negatively about your work here get you down. They are obviously jealous of people who do better work than they can and probably are a bunch of Frontpage users anyway. Pay no attention to them is my advice.

Oh - one more thing, for the comment about “bandwidth is cheap”. Craig’s List serves up Billions of pages each month. Yes, that is Billions with a capital “B”. This means that they have a monster bandwidth fee to run their sites. Since most of their entire system is free, they do have to keep on top of this issue or they could find themselves not making any money at all.