Amazon.co.uk redesign to (not quite) Web standards
May 19th, 2008Over the past few months Amazon have been tweaking their existing site to improve the design and user experience. They have done a good job, but I couldn’t help but notice that they have only gone half the way to using Web standards in their redesign efforts. Here’s a little (non-exhaustive) summary of what they are missing:
- The HTML isn’t really that semantic, if you remove the style sheet the content doesn’t really flow that well - a(ccessibility barrier to non-graphical browsers)
- No DOCTYPE to inform browsers of what version of HTML they are using
- A huge amount of page specific CSS and JavaScript, could this have been moved into an external file to be reused elsewhere?
- They are STILL using tables for content and page layout - very inflexible, non-semantic and harder to update, increases code to content ratio (lowers SEO - although Amazon are all over SEO)
- Page design doesn’t scale well when you increase the font size
- No use of access keys or tab indexes so a user can’t tab logically through the navigation
- No use of skip to content or skip navigation links
Amazon still provides a great online shopping experience, but you have thought that if they had gone to the trouble of redesigning their site they would have taken a few lessons out of Yahoo’s book and gone down the full Web standards route.
Leave a reply