Well I really did have my writeup on Craiglist ready to push out the door, but I saw this comment from Kevin stating:
It’s getting to the point where the only reason I click on the whitespace feed anymore is because I’m curious about what you’re going to bitch about or badmouth today. Cheers.
So of course I didn’t want him to think that all is not happy and wonderful in the land of Whitespace and decided that since it is Friday I would ask a simple question to help me and others out. What’s your favorite color?
As you may or may not have noticed my color choices basically runs from black, white and red (with some gray, but that’s like black/white) so I figured it’s a good time to have my eyes opened up to others. Or maybe everyone likes red, but just a different shade than #900. I realize not everyone can like the colors that shit out of a rainbow like Rundle (wait till you see some of the new 9rules colors…) does, but I know your tastes have to be better than mine so why don’t you share your favorite color (in hex or RGB values please) so we can all get some new favs.
Today Scott Kidder informed me that Gawker released a new redesign of their tabloid site Sploid. I always like hearing about redesigns, especially when they concern major properties so I was very excited.
However, nothing could’ve prepared me for this one.
Now I love innovation and trying new things on boring old blog designs. The original Sploid was a step in a different direction and this one takes about five more steps out there. For the better though? I’m not quite sure.
For me it’s really, really confusing. What do I click? What do I read? Is this Sploid or Oddjack? When did these stories happen? Is the text under the picture part of the picture or a different story completely?
I don’t think you should be asking so many questions when presented with a site. Again though, I do like the risk taking of the designers. Would you attempt something like this?
The 9rules Team has been having mini-meetings with regards to the direction we should take the 9rules Network homepage. We love the current homepage, but once I explain the problem you will see that it has to change. We think we came up with a pretty good solution and Mike and Colin are working hard at getting it done, however with me being the curious type I would love to hear what you think could be done with the page.
The Problem
The current homepage works well with a limited number of sites and only one language, but our group of English sites continues to grow and soon we are announcing Spanish sites into the network. We don’t want a list of 100 sites (the list is too big already) and we want the user of the homepage to have an option of whether they want English only, Spanish only or a mix.
Your ideas also have to keep in mind that new languages will be introduced in the future and more and more sites are jumping on board. Also giving everyone equal face time on the homepage is very important.
Hopefully you can see the challenge this presents, but it’s a fun challenge indeed. If you had to do what we are doing how would you go about it? Our solution was to stop looking at the page as a homepage and more of a web application.
Redesigns are a funny thing over here at Whitespace. If you have been here for a number of months/years then you know redesigns are nothing special, the only thing that really changes is the layout as I do my experimenting. This is the case with this most recent redesign effort.
There is still lots of little things to fix and add, but the previous design got on my nerves (which is usually why I redesign in the first place).
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CSS-based designs are becoming all too popular in many websites these days. Without taking the time to fully examine what “semantics” are doing to a website, many designers are making the switch to CSS-based design, simply because it is what the popular action to take is. Tabular layouts are often rendered more correctly than CSS/division layouts, take less time to debug due to this, are just as accessible (if not more accessible) to non-graphical clients, help organize the code of a page more effectively, and are just as standards-compliant as “semantic” layouts when coded properly. For these reasons, I feel that it is important to take a new look at using tables to design websites, and perhaps even make recommendations to the W3C to create new tags that will help designers organize and manage websites even more efficiently than tables can.
Standards are useful. Semantic markup are pointless.
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