The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced a redesign of its decades-old Web site.
The redesign is currently in beta but open to public preview and feedback, with a release date later in 2023.
W3C website
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a non-profit organization that develops Web standards.
The current web design, which dates back to late 2008, is attractive but also outdated.
Maybe because the site is managed by different groups that publish subsites, some pages On the current site it has never been updated and still uses the pre-2009 design.
The new W3C Web Design
The new design looks modern, although the W3C logo remains the same.
For example, the current W3C homepage is full of text.
The new experimental homepage is easier on the eyes and allows for more white space.
The W3C site is huge, consisting of many subsites run by different people.
Website: A search of W3.org returns over 600,000 web pages.
Redesigning the site was a huge undertaking because of the size but also because of the goal of being accessible and easy to navigate.
Blog post about the new design:
This covers how we got started with the design, content and technology audit, reviewing who uses the W3C website, what to communicate with, and how it is currently managed (it’s complicated!).
The work evolved into design, CMS selection, front-end development, user testing, accessibility work, design systems, technical build of a Symfony front-end site, browser, accessibility testing (using DAC and Zoonou), and more. “
Understandably, the rough edges in the new beta website remain.
I did a partial crawl of a test site and detected over a hundred unnecessary redirects caused by encoding links to the wrong URL.
Over two thousand pages link to this URL:
https://beta.w3.org/translations/
Which redirects to this URL:
https://beta.w3.org/Translations/
Hopefully the goal is to standardize the URLs so that they all use lowercase and that some URLs are not yet converted to lowercase.
Navigating the new site is easy. Navigating the site is intuitive.
It is also a pleasure to read.
In announcing their goals, they stated:
“The goals of the redesign are to achieve a cleaner, modern look, greater usability and accessibility, as well as ultimately simplify how the site is managed.
We also want to offer integrated versions of Japanese and Chinese, which we will roll out after the beta version of the English site ends. “
It is safe to say that they succeeded.
The site is still in beta so it is expected that the site will not be perfect.
All are invited to preview the beta version of the site and provide feedback.
Read the official W3C announcement:
W3C releases a beta of its new website
Visit the newly redesigned beta site
