Simon Willison’s Weblog

Zend re-design... terrible!

3rd November 2002

Zend (the commercial company behind the PHP scripting language) have launched a redesign of Zend.com. My verdict on the new design ... terrible.

• Non-standards compliant code and a huge mass of nested tables
• The main site navigation is a bunch of pull-down menus that don’t work with javascript disabled (or in Opera)
• The fonts are tiny, and are sized using pixels meaning they can’t be resized in IE.
• They haven’t cleaned up the information architecture, which has been the worst part of the site for ages (there is still very little distinction provided between Articles, Tips, Columns, Tutorials and Code Gallery Spotlight)
• A lot of the navigation on the front page is images with no alt attribute!—navigating the site in lynx is a case of trying to guess which [LINK] goes where

The positives? Well, it works in Netscape 4. Wake up and smell the coffee guys, 1996 was a long time ago.