Also the focus of your points is totally about UX and does not take in to account commercial issues such as advertising and search engines which both are clearly important for Smashing Mag to succeed (in the real world there has to be some balance).

I’d really like to get down to individual points, but I don’t have the time you clearly put in to your post. But I would like to just draw out the navigation points and say well done for identifying the issue with accessibility with no images, but I would suggest that keeping a HOME button in the navigation all over the site is helpful for users to keep everything uniform and recognisable.

Finally the 12 different links issue, all the links are clearly recognisable and are ‘usual’ ways of displaying links, apart from the article headers, and to be fair the fact they are links are just for those people who ‘expect’ them to be links, it’s first and foremost to identify the article (plus it helps with search engine linking). It comes across as if you think 12 different ways of linking is like putting 12 different fonts including Comic Sans on a page, I don’t believe this can be seen in the same way. Standardising link format in articles or menus or sidebars is important, but to standardise them across a whole page and site, ergh, that’s one surefire way to suck any life out of a website, and that’s what your redesign has done.

PS. Sorry had to squeeze one more thing in, Logo: from my experience, don’t mess with the clients logo, even if it is does have layout issues.

Thanks for the detailed feedback (esp. from the Smashing Magazine reader’s perspective).

… Vitaly claims that large posts are their “signature”

I agree with the point of having something unique in your site/blog which makes it stand out in crowd, however, its important to consider whether our so called ‘signature’ enhances UX or vice-versa.

It took me almost a month to redesign Smashing magazine and I deeply considered every element (sidebar, footer, etc.) so as to make it more useful than the current version. However, I’ve noticed that they haven’t changed anything. People, who commented here, agreed with most of the points, but Smashing magazine seems adamant to stick with their current design lacking details (e.g. 12 link colors, “coding” instead of “code” in main-navigation).

I agree with all of your suggestions and will implement them in future (when I’m free to give another shot to Smashing Magazine).

Thanks again, Joel.

I am also a UI/UX web designer, and I wanted to give you a little feedback on this self-initiated redesign of SashingMagazine.com from the perspective of somebody who regularly uses Smashing Magazine (I even have the SM Book!).

First, while I don’t agree with all of the points you made in your initial critique – I must say that I like almost everything you did in your redesign.

Topmost I must say that the redesign conveys more of a sense of being content driven and user oriented, rather than advertising driven and advertiser oriented. As a regular smashingmagazine.com visitor, I do get that impression often.

Also, while Vitaly claims that large posts are their “signature”, as a user I do not feel it contributes any to my experience and rather like how you’ve proposed to present the posts instead. It actually does give me a sense that I can scan or browse more of the content than before, as in the “large post preview” version SM currently uses I often feel like I would have to “travel” further down the page to see more which often I just don’t feel like doing.

One suggestion in your redesign, however, would be to list more than two articles, such as perhaps 6 or even 8. Also, rather than just an “Older Entries” button, I would prefer to see a list of page number results 1 2 3 4 5 6…etc.

Another idea along this vein would be to have some type of script that dynamically feeds more posts right into this same area. In that case, maybe two could still be appropriate. The script could even be set to fade into new posts automatically after so many seconds so the user knows it’s a dynamically interactive area.

From the users standpoint, I also really like how you’ve made the links standardized in terms of color and size across the whole page. Since I’m a web designer and have not thought about this from that perspective before, I was shocked to really experience how much less I had to think about what was a link and what was not. My only suggestion would be in better support of Smashing’s brand, the links could be a different color such as red or orange. Perhaps orange and red on hover?

Also, I must note that the description you have of Smashing in the footer connected with the characters is much more appealing than the current version at SmashignMagazine.com – for a couple reasons: 1) I have never even noticed those characters before and I’ve been visiting SM for at least a couple years. I think adding the description makes them feel much more like they have a story and less like they are just some random illustration. 2) Even if I had noticed them before, I would probably never have clicked them because I wouldn’t really want to waste time going to a whole other page to learn more about SM. I’m there for the content, so I don’t care much about the SM itself. But having that little bit altogether in the footer is inviting enough to read and unobtrusive enough not to scare me off.

Again, great work!!