Betalogue

Web design expert and Designing with Web Standards author Jeffrey Zeldman has redesigned his web site yet again. I guess I wasn’t the only one who was rather unimpressed by the previous redesign.

The new design is significantly better. There’s less wasted space (although the use of a fixed width layout is questionable). The bits of text used in picture files look much better.

I am not sure about the colour scheme, however. It looks rather “washed out” and lacks contrast (between the text and the background). In addition, I don’t understand the idea of only using a significantly different colour for links when the mouse is hovering over them. Rather, I can understand it for links in the navigation menu or navigation bar, where high contrast is not essential. But for links within the body text, it seems to me that it should always be clear for readers where the links are. Right now, in Zeldman’s design, the only difference between regular text and links is the font weight and the use of a slightly different shade of pale green. I am afraid that is not enough.

I have a similar problem with the style he uses for quoted text. There is no difference in the colour of the font or the background. The only difference is the use of a serif font rather than a sans-serif font. Here again, I am not convinced.

Still, on the whole, it looks much better.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, May 3rd, 2004 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.