The W3C Want Your Feedback

By | April 12, 2009 | News

6

W3C redesignLet’s be honest: few of us spend much time on the W3C website excitedly pouring over the latest guidelines and specifications. The documents and the design itself are probably best described as functional rather than attractive.

However, last month the W3C launched a new beta version of their website that incorporates a fresher, clearer, more modern design. The redesign aims to:

  • make it easier to locate the information you require
  • create a consistent page navigation
  • follow the conventions used by other websites
  • make previously hidden content easier to find
  • provide aggregated community information
  • improve rendering on mobile devices (train journeys will never be boring again!)
  • ensure pages meet WCAG 2.0 guidelines
  • improve maintenance, and
  • adopt technologies such as RSS.

It’s best not to expect whizzy graphics and animated widgets, but the new design is certainly an improvement on their increasingly dated website.

Do you like it? Will it persuade you to eagerly visit the site every day? Do you hate it? Does the blue and grey design make you ill? The W3C is looking for feedback from the web development community regarding the design, usability and any other aspect of the website.

Links:

We welcome your comments here too.

Get Started with
Ruby on Rails

Github, Twitter and Hulu. All huge. All successful. All Rails.

Learn the web development framework of the moment with our newest book and course.

Learn Rails

Craig Buckler

Craig is a Director of OptimalWorks, a UK consultancy dedicated to building award-winning websites implementing standards, accessibility, SEO, and best-practice techniques.

More Posts - Website

{ 6 comments }

triticum April 23, 2009 at 4:30 pm

Very nice indeed ;o)
- lots of space between columns and boxes. Easy to find my favorites: XPath, CSS etc.

Patrik April 15, 2009 at 10:08 pm

I also had some trouble to find the menu at the first sight. Jeez, come on. And what about that 100% width of the page? It’s really annoying me (have a large screen) to have such a large viewport of reading text.

And I agree with Wardrop, too much information at one time.

Black Max April 13, 2009 at 11:01 am

Man, it’s like they’ve designed a site to illustrate how not to design an information/content site….

Robbo89 April 13, 2009 at 9:49 am

I agree with everything Wardop said, they need to put more work into the useability.

Guillem April 13, 2009 at 6:50 am

Way better than the prior one, but I agree with Wardrop. It’s still too easy to get lost.

The main page is a bit of a mess. Using Firefox 3 i see following: Why is that “Web for All” section down there? Why do you have 2 “About W3C” links? The separation between the blogs on the right side and the “story” part in the middle is not clear. Etc., etc.

Granted, it may be a question of taste, but I find it confuse. It gets better, though, when you go into some random section.

Wardrop April 13, 2009 at 12:19 am

It definitely looks more appealing, and while ironically, the old website was one of the worst I’d seen, the new site doesn’t improve on it all that drastically from a usability perspective. After first landing on the home page, I’m still immediately lost. An absolute information overload (like a lot of other popular sites surprisingly). There’s stuff everywhere, I don’t know where to look, and when I finally find the menu, I soon discover there’s another menu just to confuse me even further. I’m being very negative, yes, but come on, these guys develop the standards, let’s see them use their standards in a elegant and very functional way.

Comments on this entry are closed.