Fortune Redesign

Fortune Magazine's website (or is it now CNN/Money on the web?) has gone through a full re-design. Overall, I think its a solid improvement to their old site. Even on line one of the source code, you can spot a solid improvement: this time they bothered to declare the a freakin' doctype.

That said, given the vast resources of AOL-Time-Warner, you'd think they'd have somebody on staff that knows how to code and style an unordered list. Take this markup for a list of recent stories:

In short, that is ridiculous markup. And no, this ain't nitpicking. You might wonder what that "#149;" crap is... well I'll show you: • 

That's right, the freaking bullet is hardcoded... I didn't know big corporations considered sort of knowing how to throw together a web page on a wysiwyg editor the only requirement for their web designers.

Markup not-withstanding, however, I think they've moved in a very good direction in terms of design, and user interface. Where there markup stinks, their overall idea smells like flowers:

• Consistant navigation, using both hard coded links, and a javascript dropdown menus.
• Clean, and efficent design that uses lots of WHITESPACE!
• The page holds its poor self together without excessive javascript! (I wish I was faking my excitement about this one)

In conclusion, they would have gotten an a+ had they used proper unordered lists (which a high school student in web design class should know). No excuses for that. They get b minus as a result.

BTW, who on earth decided that CNN/Money was a stronger brand than Fortune? Me thinks it was the same people who decided Time-Warner would benefit from attaching AOL to its brand name.