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WSA Winner

Wasserwerke Zwickau

Thursday October 21st, 2004

Good design crosses the boundaries of language, and with the prevalence of english speaking "experts" and weblogs in the Standards world, it's good to see that the benefits are also being found outside our own small world.

The work done on Wasserwerke Zwickau was good enough to just pip Lousco's excellent site as this month's winner. The two took different approaches, but in the end the clean lines of WW Zwickau edged out Lousco's more intimate feel. With it's adherence to correct mime-type serving it could even be the first true Web Standards site awarded here!

“Winning by a very narrow margin over the 2nd choice. A beautiful clean layout and clean markup, for sure, but what made it for me was that even the "plain old text-only" sitemap looks good. I love that kind of attention do detail.”
Makiko Itoh

“I like the bold, yet clean, visual look of this site. The subtile color and nice use of white space make this a very nice site to look at.”

D. Keith Robinson

“The Fixed-width Centered Design (FCD) look is a bit played out, but Wasserwerke Zwickau has a nice take on the content area. The striking header makes generous use of white space to contrast the wide logotype, and an eye-catching photo on every major section keeps it lively. The cool palette is wonderful and the typography is consistent.”

Dave Shea

Original review:

The good folks at Heimrich und Hannot bring us a new site for the Water Company in Zwickau, East Germany. It's a simple and clear design that works well within the given corporate surrounding, but the biggest impact comes from the fact that the whole site is served as "application/xhtml+xml". This is thereby the first site featured here on WSA that manages to follow the recommendations of the W3C, even if content negotiation is necessary to avoid disastrous results in IE.

WZ is designed by Enrico Wuttke (aka "Flim") and developed by Matthias Lotze. Matthias also points out that the site currently looks bad in IE Mac, but those faithful to that browser shouldn't worry since the problem is diagnosed and about to be cured.

Reviewed by Johan Edlund

Comments on: Wasserwerke Zwickau

#1

I'm very drawn to the soft color palette. Very elegant.

My only critique is that linked text and emphasized text look the same color. The only difference is the underline for links. While this is good, it still creates confusion as to what is a link and what is not. I apologize if this comment is out of context as a result of my inability to understand the language.

Posted by Dan Mall :: October 21st, 2004 at 11:59 AM

#2

Effective and elegant identity. Best and most subtle use of dropshadows I've seen yet. The semantically-rich code is quite impressive, but I've one gripe: The h1#header is set in fine print when it should be hidden using an image replacement technique (see http://www.mezzoblue.com/tests/revised-image-replacement/).

Posted by Christopher :: October 21st, 2004 at 02:17 PM

#3

Great use of semantically correct markup on a simple but beautiful layout. At first I thought it was weird to put the navigation after the content, but they have included 'skip to' links for the content and naviation (if styles are disabled). They even have included an alternate (more accessible) version of each page with basic styling!

Posted by Nick Verstappen :: October 22nd, 2004 at 10:27 AM

#4

Very good standart-conform coded and fully optimized webside. Style and color-selection are also nearly perfect.
Are these coders still members of W3C or is this the work of a maschine?

Posted by Michelle S. :: October 25th, 2004 at 09:14 AM

#5

Wow very nice! Extremely clean and simple and I like it :)

Posted by David Jones - Elegant Design :: November 13th, 2004 at 02:05 AM

#6

Clean and crisp just like the water they manage.

I like the simple layout. There's alot of sites that could be improved just by being a little simpler and less busy like this one.

One thing though, some of the photos, like the water towers for instance (I don't speak german), could have been cropped a little better. But overall a great job.

Posted by Tim :: November 18th, 2004 at 11:46 PM