Facelift of OO.org
OpenOffice.org, the site that is responsible for a software suite that is a substitution for Microsoft Office, has undergone a face lift just a week ago. It looks very pretty now, and really fulfilled what the designers had intended.
Besides cleaning up the homepage the overall look of the site was addressed, for two reasons: getting it more inline with the ’style’ of OpenOffice.org, and making it visually more appealing. Though the house-style of OpenOffice.org is not yet well defined, I believe the current website is a good improvement on the previous site regarding to visual style. We went for a fresh, blue and cool look with a little colour.
According to the webmasters who designed the new layout, the site is now XHTML-transitional and the layout is controlled via CSS.
The main (technical) goal was to provide standards-compliant XHTML-Transitional. At the same time Maarten was the driving force in getting rid of tables and using some other elements that give the contents a logical structure, not a layout (the layout is now defined in the CSS).
I wasn’t really keen on validating the pages nor the css, but it’s a pity that they had to use tables for the left navigation bar and the right content area. They could have used CSS to do that with some left-right or some margin tricks. But oh well, good enough that they had gone that far to do such a layout and who am I to really judge what they had done.
Well I guess more people should start designing pages with CSS already, instead of doing tables. ;) Let’s stick with standards, not break them.