John,
I've been waiting for one of the Australian members of the mailing
list to comment on the new look/code for http://abc.net.au/ so I
might as well raise the issue myself.
I personally had nothing to do with the design, code or any other
aspect of it (apart from being involved in a very broad
consultative process), but I'd be interested in a WSG perspective.
all in all, a great redesign, compared with the page of old (as you
may know, I've seen it a lot :-) (to those who may not know, my wife
works at the ABC :-)
I am very glad that there aren't any drop down menus (I am happy to
say these are an abomination on principle and should be avoided like
the plague) and text as images is almost entirely avoided. I think
the use of the text in the masthead is entirely appropriate and think
the choice to make it an image element rather than background image
is entirely correct. Most people would have used CSS for that but I
think what you've done is better n principle and in fact.
Minor nitpick - I might have suggested an em driven top navigation
bar - at present, the text is clipped as you zoom it in that bar. But
that may have had significant impacts on the design of the rest of
the site.
I noted also the use of a bg image for the select location button -
which shows up as you zoom. The sliding doors technique could work
for that, but I'd always suggest making a button a platform specific
button.
CSS doesn't appear to have any bugs, but one slight HTML problem -
there is a style element inside the body of the page.
All in all, from first look a nice usable accessible design, with
almost entirely valid markup,
well done
j
(compare http://gov.au, possibly the worst page on the web!)
John Allsopp
style master :: css editor :: http://westciv.com/style_master
support forum :: http://support.westciv.com
blog :: dog or higher :: http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher
Web Essentials web development conference http://we05.com
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