WSA Winner
Wednesday May 5th, 2004
This is a clean, flowing site. Large blocks of colour separate text and navigation nicely, letting the content breathe but still filling the screen with interest. Sparse usage of Flash for feature items lends some vibrancy to the higher level pages without distracting from the real content.
The drop down menus feature some nice JavaScript to give that sliding feel, but still offer a suitable navigation path for non-JS browsers. Most of the pages have a few entity reference problems preventing them from validating, but the code is clean, well-formed and style separated.
Reviewed by Cameron Adams
#1
The site looks lovely, but try looking at some of the internal pages with style sheets disabled. The JavaScript then has an unfortunate "overlapping" effect on the navigation lists, making them unreadable.
Posted by Keith Bell :: May 5th, 2004 at 11:13 AM
#2
Yes! This is such a big improvement since their last site. I saw this site on CSS Vault, and I wanted this to win an WSA award. Thanks, Cameron. Good taste :)
Posted by Christoph :: May 5th, 2004 at 11:09 PM
#3
Speaking as one of a small team of developers on this, I can say we put in a good number of late evenings (and weekends) working on this thing. The goal was standards-based layout, compliancy and separation of concerns, both client-side and server-side (via a Struts-based framework.)
It was difficult to get absolutely 100% perfect, but I think we came quite close to our original goal. I was allowed to have some fun in developing the nav animation and other functionality, it made for a unique project because it was an internal redesign and a chance to develop entirely from scratch.
Here's to Web standards and float-based layout! :)
Posted by Scott Schiller :: May 6th, 2004 at 01:21 AM
#4
dudes, this site is nice, but some parts feel smooth, and some parts feel more cornered edges.
Posted by Danny Cohen :: May 7th, 2004 at 06:40 PM
#5
Indeed, very nice. A few comments though. In Opera the menu floats over the text which was supposed to be next to the title. That text is now below instead of next to the title. Furthermore the pop-down menu's don't work on the startpage. Only when having clicked once on a menuitem do they work (in Opera). When running lare resolutions, larger than your standard 1024*768 the background repeats itself in the vertical direction, giving strange blocks of colour where I suppose it should be white! Anyway, good work, just proves that tables for layout-purposes really are unneccessary in today websites!
Posted by Sebastiaan Naafs - van Dijk :: July 19th, 2004 at 11:00 AM
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