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September 7, 2004
RedStar is Live
By QBlog in
Congratulations to Quixtar for their new, improved Web site. I haven't taken it for a thorough test run but I like what I see. It's cleaner, leaner and hopefully not meaner ;o) One of the fundamental rules of usability is that less can be (and often is) more and while the old site ignored that truth, the new site design seems to "get it."
I've been extremely critical of the old Quixtar Web site in the past and so I feel that it's important for me to take some time to give credit where it's due. Good job Quixtar. My only complaint right now is that (at least the visitor views) it still uses tables instead of div tags. That's not such a big deal but with the growing embrace of XHTML 1.0 I would have liked to see Quixtar take this redesign opportunity to fully embrace that markup transition and eschew tables.
The weird thing is that the DOCTYPE for the home page is XHTML 1.0 Transitional (a more forgiving version than XHTML 1.0 strict) but when I throw it into the W3C validator it spits out errors like crazy (157 errors). I wish the design team would have at least tried to get the site to validate... or I guess a better way to say it is that I'd be really, really impressed with Quixtar if their site validated. I'm not criticizing Quixtar for having a site that doesn't validate because, well... my own blog doesn't validate and even has more errors! I'm just pointing out what could have been. And maybe this will motivate me to get back into my blog template and bring this site up to W3C specs.
Anyway, Quixtar 2.0 looks good. I may have more to say after looking at it more thoroughly but I believe it's a tremendous improvement over the old design and congratulate the RedStar team on a job well done.
Comments
One other thing, the site is also having some problems going between SSL and non-SSL. This is evident on the contact and IBO page and the login section of the front screen.
If you press the submit button to login with no information, it will submit through an SSL url, but on error will return through the SSL version of the site, which is fine except most of the images are from non-secure which means there'll either not show up (firefox) or you'll get a "this page contains non-secure items" (IE).
I'm trying really hard not to be picky, but these are really simple issues that need to be ironed out in beta stages, not open to the public.
Rant over, I better go do some actual work now :)
Eric,
Did you notice the Real Quixtar blog listing on the homepage?
I can't seem to get in at all without trying multiple times. It gives a server busy error. Perhaps I should wait until 2 a.m.? Do you guys think this problem will go away?
I can't get my PV for last month at all. it doesn't work. and a lot of the graphics don't work either. you'd think with all the hoopla that they'd have worked it out beforehand? and what's with the very low quality graphics???
i admit, the design is much more user-friendly, but design should complement the functionality.
blah. another QUixappointment
A lot of the links do not work, it loads slow and I could not get on until 11:30pm!
I agree, a tremendous improvement, I often wondered how it was that the Australian site (www.a2k.com.au) was so nice and the american so poorly done. Looks like its finally caught up design wise.
Having said that, like yourself, I am disappointed though not entirely surprised that the site doesn’t validate properly. It is a sad fact that most big corporations don’t allow time for proper markup simply because it doesn’t help them on the bottom line and 95% (depending on the company) wont notice a difference.
One thing strange I found was that when looking at particular products it defines the page as HTML4 and "loose". But everywhere else seems to be XHTML transitional. Ironically the 'loose' pages still dont validate...
Posted by: Jarrah | September 7, 2004 6:44 PM