Fortune Redesign

01.10.2006

Fortune Magazine's website (or is it now CNN/Money on the web?) has gone through a full re-design. Overall, I think its a solid improvement to their old site. Even on line one of the source code, you can spot a solid improvement: this time they bothered to declare the a freakin' doctype.

That said, given the vast resources of AOL-Time-Warner, you'd think they'd have somebody on staff that knows how to code and style an unordered list. Take this markup for a list of recent stories:

<div class="cnnBullets">•&nbsp;<a href="/2005/12/22/technology/ces_biz20_122205/index.htm" target="_top">A coming-out party for 3G</a></div><div class="cnnBullets">•&nbsp;<a href="/2005/12/23/technology/eyeballs_biz20_122305/index.htm" target="_top">Bubble-era buyouts are back</a></div></div>

In short, that is ridiculous markup. And no, this ain't nitpicking. You might wonder what that "#149;" crap is... well I'll show you: • 

That's right, the freaking bullet is hardcoded... I didn't know big corporations considered sort of knowing how to throw together a web page on a wysiwyg editor the only requirement for their web designers.

Markup not-withstanding, however, I think they've moved in a very good direction in terms of design, and user interface. Where there markup stinks, their overall idea smells like flowers:

  • Consistant navigation, using both hard coded links, and a javascript dropdown menus.
  • Clean, and efficent design that uses lots of WHITESPACE!
  • The page holds its poor self together without excessive javascript! (I wish I was faking my excitement about this one)

In conclusion, they would have gotten an a+ had they used proper unordered lists (which a high school student in web design class should know). No excuses for that. They get b minus as a result.

BTW, who on earth decided that CNN/Money was a stronger brand than Fortune? Me thinks it was the same people who decided Time-Warner would benefit from attaching AOL to its brand name.

Comments

Hardcoding.....

Bullets and the like are hardcoded for the sake of cross browser compatability...  Most people use images to be safe, but when you're dealing with a site that hosts a lot of content that's dynamically driven it's always a good idea to keep the page kb's down. 

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