The absolute worst web design trend of 2009 is this header background that extends beyond the container and makes it look like the header is on a piece of paper that has been folded around the background. Let me show you what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/yP7CH.png

It's a silly and needless ornamentation that wasn't cool or interesting when the first person did it, and became even more worthless and boring with each successive use. Bahhumbug!

I'll hug it and kiss it and apologize if I see it used in a way even remotely relevant to the context of the content, or integrated into the visual language of the design (e.g. on a blog about origami), but until then, I'm a hater. I'd rather see drop shadows under blinking text; at least that would be quasi-original.

Also, the blue logo area pops so ridiculously hard it makes it impossible to keep my attention focused on the rest of the page. I'd tone it down to a smooth #80a7d3, like you see in the image I linked above.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled w3 finally redesigned the site; on first impression it appears to be a marked improvement.

I dont really understand how you could dislike it so much, its a tiny flourish that gives a little visual hierarchy

What's the hierarchy that it establishes that the large type, all-caps, and oddly-spaced embossed icon didn't already establish?

I guess it's not really the "flourish". (I like that term for it)

What really bothers me is that, on the whole, it feels like the designer put more effort into the flourish than into creating a design that would support and enhance the communication of the content.

It's the (wrong) idea that you can appropriate these stylistic elements that will make a design appear current, cool, or 'with it' - and that somehow adding in what all the old-timers would call "bells and whistles" is a worthy trade-off for the practice of good design.

Agreed. But I don't know what visual hierarchy means.

The left menu section is a piece coming up and folding over at the top (the shadow that looks like a drop shadow is a curve into the screen) with the w3c piece being a loop around this?

IMO this effect would have worked on the center content part making it appear to be topmost but doesn't work on the side menu.

I like this "effect" a lot. I actually didn't notice it until you pointed it out, but now that I've seen it, I'm glad it's there.

The thing with aesthetics is that everyone has different preferences. Presumably the designer of this site liked it. He/she is not the only one.

It looks a bit like a generic domain squatters landing page. No soul. Before it showed clearly that passionate programmers where at work. Now it looks like a "design job". A bit too much for my taste.

Not sure if I would go so far as to say it looks like a domain squatter page.

it reminds me of the default wordpress theme

Of course the first thing I did was validate it. Couldn't help myself... It passed.

The HTML did, but not the CSS :-P

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%...

From the looks of the star html and _border declarations, validation is failing due to the IE-specific hacks :-P

The uppermost nav menu is a blob of text, the nav item "standards" is repeated (Standards, STANDARDS, standards, STANDARDS) like the date of a monster truck rally, and there's no obvious difference between left-nav and top-nav. It looks like a blog from 2005 viewed in a browser with the wrong fonts. Who designed it?

It looks like a cheap bastardization of Drupal's default template that I think they launched with Drupal 5 several years ago.

Quite simply I think they tried too hard. The gradients and whitespace are extremely clumsy. It would look 10 times better with flat colors and standardized on some kind of grid and font size scheme.

And still a wrong doctype or mime type, depending on how you look at it.

Not really a fan. The W3C does so much that their past homepages have suffered from a mass of undifferentiated links. This design attempts to solve the problem by taking down the number of links, but the dearth of contrast and colour means it's still very hard to tell what's important, what's time-sensitive, and what's always there.

I don't get the point of the drop shadow under the blue square where the w3c logo appears. It breaks the harmony. It bugs me.

Look at the bottom of the page. The footer has the same effect. IMO it's not a drop shadow but is supposed to suggest that the section below is curving smoothly away and back under as if that element was made of a piece of paper that was rolled over the top.

On the whole it looks like they were close to having something great.

I'm tempted to say that index.html should be an index. You know 1994-style blue links in <li>'s in a nice hierarchy and nothing else. The old site used to be like that, deep linking from the front page to the specs etc. and a newsfeed in the middle. For some reason, I hate this new design. Maybe it's just "We fear change!"

why are the left and top menus (standards, participate, ...) the same? that seems very odd for an otherwise fairly professional-looking page.

edit: and why have the "pointer" point to yet another instance of the word "standards" rather than the one in the top menu? i know it's way better than it was, but it seems odd to be so much better and yet still have odd things like that...

> why are the left and top menus (standards, participate, ...) the same?

Looks like the top menu is static, but the left menu changes as you navigate. Compare the two on this page: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership-benefits

Kinda falls apart on pages like this: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fee-history

There's a lot of needless elements though. Go here: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership.html, then click on the drop-down under 'Fees'. The 'current fees' link takes you to the same page that the 'Fees' link goes to. And the 'fee history' link goes to a page that is also linked to from the page the 'Fees'/'current fees' links go to.

Same with the drop-down under "Join W3C" The "Join W3C" link and the "how to join" link both point to the same URL: "http://www.w3.org/Consortium/join

Dig deeper.

But you are right, the underlying system is hard to figure out.

They're using PHP and Smarty, from looking at comments in the source code.

I find it highly ironic that the people in charge of web standards and consistency use the programming language with least consistent syntax.

Does consistency in programming language somehow automatically translate to consistency in output?

No. What I find ironic is the cultural mismatch. PHP seems an unlikely language for technological idealists.

I don't think they are really idealists - more pragmatic than idealism implies.

Heh, I think it ties in very nicely with my experience of W3C specs!