Google Pages is basically Geocities 2.0. You get a wysiwyg editing interface, a bunch of templates to pick from, and the ability to make as many pages as you need. Time will tell if this revolutionizes the web the way Geocities did (aside from all the obvious crappy pages from Geocities, it did give thousands of new writers and designers a place to start), but it's certainly a cool set of tools to do something mundane like start a website. [via waxy]
posted by mathowie on Feb 23, 2006 - 88 comments

When Wired News redesigned as nearly standards compliant xhtml in fall of 2002, it was cause for a great deal of celebration. Since then other prominent sites like ESPN and PGA have jumped on the standards bandwagon, as have countless personal sites. Today the SF Examiner launched a new site design which does validate as xhtml. More interesting to me are their category archives and date archives, which mimic a weblog's simple and useful layout. Heck, I even love the story pages which feature large leaded text (space between lines - the amount of "double spaceness") which is also blog-like, and makes for comfortable reading. As far as I know, SF Examiner is the first, but will this start a new wave of bandwidth-saving, well-designed newspaper redesigns? [via veen]
posted by mathowie on Aug 2, 2004 - 11 comments

Bom is some sort of project management company, but I'm more impressed by their whiz-bang cool design on their site. Kinda like the HabboHotel, Eboy (their town), and k10k aesthetic taken corporate.
posted by mathowie on Jul 9, 2002 - 8 comments

This orthopaedic surgery site seems more like a design exercise than an actual attempt at an informative site. Imagine that someone told you to make the site using poor technology choices, couple it with non-professional content not conducive to trusting the doctors, and add a map to the office that does more to enable chuckles than get people to into the business. It's so bad, it's good, and most definitely do not skip intro on this one.
posted by mathowie on Apr 13, 2002 - 32 comments

Design Not Found is 37signals' latest work. They highlight the very best and worst of online contingency design, the design of pages presented to users when things go wrong. It's looking like it could quickly become a killer resource for users to report examples and web application designers to learn from those.
posted by mathowie on Nov 28, 2001 - 19 comments

MetaFilter is a hosting company now?
posted by mathowie on Mar 29, 2001 - 265 comments

Mini-MOMA is all the wonder of a large US city Museum of Modern Art, crammed into tiny pixelated goodness. Mouseover the pieces to see titles and artist names. [via archinect]
posted by mathowie on Dec 5, 2000 - 1 comment

Awesome splash page spoof of KPMG's marketing-speak site. Of course now that web design is over, I guess it's better that sites start looking alike.
posted by mathowie on Jul 24, 2000 - 10 comments

Adbusters' Design Manifesto 2000 is an interesting read. In accordance with what many people believe, and the result of corporations going too far, the question becomes, do we need something like this for web creators? A Pledge to pursue personal interests and experiments on the web, instead of just your daily e-company work? Would you sign such a thing?
posted by mathowie on May 9, 2000 - 12 comments

The 7-11 website gets my vote for scariest splash screen image, ever. A burger shaped like a hot dog? Who would ever find that remotely appetizing? The site's not all bad though, they do have slurpee postcards.
posted by mathowie on Apr 10, 2000 - 4 comments

This DHTML site is just plain amazing. Hearing that the author wrote the whole thing by hand in a text editor with nothing but a book for reference is incredible. It reminds me of seeing an insane rug or quilt at a museum and hearing it was stiched by hand using only crude sewing tools. Just thinking of the work it took to make that site makes me want to cry in pain. [link pilfered from kottke]
posted by mathowie on Apr 6, 2000 - 21 comments

Saatchi and Saatchi are once again accepting submissions for their innovation in communication awards. The deadline is approaching, and your idea better be revolutionary. Look at some of the past winners (I'd add a direct link here, but it's all flash), there are some amazing innovations there. The site is a little overboard on the flash, I know they won an award for their previous contest site, but the current one is hard to navigate, slow to load, and offers no non-flash alternative. Odd that they want to enhance communication, but their site is kind of hostile to that ideal.
posted by mathowie on Mar 30, 2000 - 1 comment

Good God, does the Fuji Film website suck. I run tall windows on my monitors, typically 700-800 pixels wide, but around a thousand pixels long, and over half my screen is blank on the Fuji site. Why on earth did they force everything to 500 pixels or so of height? I've never seen a consumer site like this do that before. The other peeve is I bought their smart media floppy adapter, and I wanted to know if there were new Windows2000 drivers for it (it came with Win9x drivers on one disk, and NT drivers on the other). Their support area only lists phone numbers of service centers, no mention of software driver downloads or knowledge bases, or even a FAQ about products. This company does *not* get the web, wake up Fuji Film, it's the 21st century now.
posted by mathowie on Mar 6, 2000 - 9 comments

The design team over at Amazon.com needs to up their medication. What was once the most tabbed-interface on the web, but still quite useful, is now a raging mess of yahoo-category-style links that are all the same color. This reminds me of the altavista redesign a few months back. I wonder if they'll lose some customers on this one.
posted by mathowie on Feb 2, 2000 - 10 comments

Former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell's site takes an interesting design approach to displaying content. Twelve small windows popup and different content is shown in the center as outside window links are clicked. Programmatically, it's interesting to other web designers and that's about it. The biggest problem with the site? The carpal tunnel you'll get when you have to close 13 windows when it's time to leave.
posted by mathowie on Jan 28, 2000 - 12 comments

Me + 2 hours of boredom = possible MetaFilter redesign. I was thumbing through this book on my shelf and got inspired. I don't know if it will work with the text-heavy posts though. Maybe with some tweaking, I could get it working. After I get the archives working, I'm going to allow for different page designs in the preferences.
posted by mathowie on Jan 21, 2000 - 7 comments

Microsoft recently put up their own page on the history of Microsoft.com. They were even cool enough to include screenshots and approximate traffic loads for each iteration of the site.
posted by mathowie on Dec 28, 1999 - 0 comments

Here's something interesting, some real-world user interface guidelines for the web, without the pompousness of that other guy
posted by mathowie on Dec 21, 1999 - 0 comments

Ugh! Jakob Nielsen is at it again, this time quantifying design conventions for the web. This quote of his stands out to me in a bad, bad way: "Therefore, I recommend following the conventions even in those cases where a different design would be better if seen in isolation." Instead of pointing out the recipie for making a boring, slightly functional site, I wish he'd stress alternatives to the emerging trends in corporate web site design.
posted by mathowie on Nov 18, 1999 - 2 comments

Wow, check Amazon's new holiday look. They've added even more new product lines (home improvement, software, and video games). How many folder tabs can they stuff into that navigation bar?
posted by mathowie on Nov 11, 1999 - 1 comment

Check out the new Netscape home page. They're showing three different designs right now, upon reloading either www.netscape.com or home.netscape.com, I'm seeing these designs: old one, new one #1, and new one #2. I like the new one #1 the most. There's probably more stuff on the page than there was before, but it's organized better. It's nice to see someone doing something different than the snap/metacrawler/go/altavista portal madness, I like the new ones a lot better than the old one.
posted by mathowie on Nov 10, 1999 - 5 comments

heh, Altavista left some of their old URLs up after the redesign. Take a look at the top banner, remember how useful the altavista.com page used to be? Thanks to their current redesign, I prefer this version of their search engine.
posted by mathowie on Nov 9, 1999 - 2 comments

My god, does the new Altavista look butt-ugly. Can you find anything anymore? I could barely see the search box when I first loaded it. And that new logo? Yawn..... And what's up with the new slogan? Smart is beautiful? What's next: 'Altavista: Check out the size of our brains'?
posted by mathowie on Oct 25, 1999 - 0 comments

Holy crap! Check out Adobe's new redesign. I love the dhtml, it looks a lot like a flash-based site, but without requiring a plugin. Although their sloppy coding creates a sideways scrollbar when they don't really need one. I like the navigation and love how selected areas "pop out" of the nav bar to indicate where you are in the site.
posted by mathowie on Oct 4, 1999 - 0 comments

http://www.razorfish.com.br/ This is sooooooo not Razorfish...
posted by mathowie on Sep 27, 1999 - 0 comments

The LA Times is working on a new look. My first impression is 'huh?' I know they contracted out Frog Design, which usually does good work, but have these guys ever tested this on anyone? It's over 700 pixels wide, the custom tabs on the left take up half the screen space, leaving little for articles (and taking all the focus away from the news). Why would you go to a Newspaper site, but for news? I hope this is an early beta, because it needs work.
posted by mathowie on Sep 22, 1999 - 0 comments

This site is one of the most extensive flash sites I've ever seen, especially for a personal site. I admit that 90% of it is window dressing, and the transitions between sections are a bit long, but the amazing artwork makes up for it. I didn't think a lot of the effects used on the site were even possible in flash.
posted by mathowie on Sep 22, 1999 - 0 comments

hmmm...does this look familiar to you?
posted by mathowie on Sep 19, 1999 - 1 comment

Sun redesigned their site today, but I can't say for sure if I like it better than the old one. It looks a lot more like every other corporate site. I used to like the way they split their audience into developers, investors, etc, now it's just products, services, store, etc., like your average company site.
posted by mathowie on Sep 8, 1999 - 0 comments

A great story on IBM.com's redesign. I have rarely used IBM's former site because it was so hard to find things. I just revisited, and I could find several products I own in only three links off the index page. It's a lot better now.
posted by mathowie on Aug 30, 1999 - 4 comments

This is the worst web navigation I've ever seen at a university web site. It's so user-unfriendly that they have Search above all options. It also happens to be my alma mater, so it's doubly sad to see.
posted by mathowie on Jul 26, 1999 - 0 comments

I found this site linked from a mom-n-pop design shop's awards page. Not only has this company stolen the Point Survey's 5% graphic, they're also using the old C|net background. Very original.
posted by mathowie on Jul 19, 1999 - 2 comments