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by ravenstine 1572 days ago
Of all the sort of needless website redesigns I've seen, this one is actually pretty decent. Having gone through this sort of thing a few times myself, I want to give kudos to those who worked on this.

In case they are reading this, here's what I liked and what I think can be approved upon:

LIKED:

- Besides the interactive examples, it looks like you stuck to using standard web fonts instead of loading some bullspit Typekit or Google Font Loader thing. Thumbs up!

- Thanks for dark mode!

- Overall the design is minimalistic. Thanks for not trying to impress everyone with "modern" design or l33t JavaScript skillz.

- Thanks for keeping MDN alive!

THINGS THAT CAN BE IMPROVED:

- The branding is less distinctive than it was before. It's definitely not bad, but the bold monospace "MDN" was more distinctive and made me feel like I wasn't on some rando site. (In fact, that logo still is visible at the footer of the page.)

- I'm not the biggest fan of the 3-column layout. Again, it's not bad, but I think I could totally do without the right-hand column and give the main content more horizontal space. Remember that your site is for developers, and I think most developers are fairly pragmatic about how much content they want to see on-screen at a time.

- The left-hand column is a bit weird. I'm not sure how much of a benefit the scrollbar provides and it also seems to jump when you get to the bottom of the page, which is distracting.

- As others have mentioned, the compatibility table seems nerfed. Definitely don't get rid of it, but I think making it more useful would have gotten more people a positive view of the new page design. If that feature provided a little more info so that I only resorted to caniuse.com 1/3 of the time as opposed to 2/3 of the time, that'd be a good win.

- Remove the hover effects for the top menu items in favor of revealing details on hover/click. Hover is the devil even on desktop; I hate it when I casually drag my cursor from the URL bar down to the page and suddenly some page element appears and covers up what I'm trying to look at.

2 comments

Agree 3 column layout is no good, that 3rd column should go back to being above the 2nd column as before, I added custom CSS to fix that
BTW, I meant "click/tap", not "hover/click".