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We love the web.
Google, darling child of the Internet, has been going through some tough times as of late. These recent stories have brought the uber-search site back into the front of my mind, and it got me really interested in an article I found tonight.
Google Redux: a design exercise, a short article by Andy Rutledge, examines the aesthetic and functional layout of Google’s homepage. Going one step further, Rutledge attempts to refine the front page of the search engine we all know and love. The article has a lot of intriguing points, calling into question placement of page elements and the forethought that went into the overall layout.
Now, granted one of Google’s strengths has always been keeping things simple, but when you start to dive into their layout and markup, you see some pretty startling things. Tables for layout? Hideous masses of non-breaking spaces? Non-sensical CSS class names? There’s a serious amount of transgressions against best practice markup going on in there! Now I’m not aiming for this to fall in the category of stuck-up developer rants, but come on Google: with the amount of cash you’re raking in, it might be time hire some developers to bring your code up to modern day standards.
On that note, where do I send my resume?
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He’s got some great points on that redesign. I know that people have been discussing this with greater frequency lately. I mean who wants to look at an all white search page at 2 in the morning? It feels like Yahoo circa 1998.
That is a great article, he also did an Ebay redux that was really good.
Reminds me of the 37Signals “37Better” project, which had some interesting results, though naturally more focused on increasing usability through simplifying everything. The PayPal one I thought was the most interesting, because PayPal’s site is a terrible mess that usually leads to double payments or worse.
http://www.37signals.com/better