Saturday, November 15, 1997

WebMonkey did a site redesign. What do you think?

1. The new site structure -- a home page showing all the current stories, and an archive listing all the older stories, grouped by categories. Every page links to all the categories.

2. Ideally, sites like this would have an index, like the index in the back of a reference book. I've often thought it would be interesting to have an index like this for DaveNet.

3. I find it confusing that the home page uses a different template from the other pages. Also, instead of repeating the navigation bar at the top of the 2nd level pages, they run it down the left edge. There's an interesting effect tied to the home page navigation section, and a gorgeous graphic of an on/off switch.

4. If you switch the switch off, you get a picture of Jeffrey Veen, lookin a little geeky, explaining why they did the redesign (an interesting piece, definitely worth a read). But... why did turning the switch off get me to this page? And what is its relationship to the other pages on the site?

5. The metadata system for their backend sounds like the attribute system in Frontier. We could use a great new sample site for Frontier 5. Hmmm.

Send mail to dave@scripting.com.

This week's Spencer F. Katt has a couple of juicy tidbits. Microsoft is doing a bundling deal for NT 5.0 with Marimba, and Apple is getting ready to acquire Silicon Graphics.