CSS Reboot 2006 is a website that promotes websites that did a complete redesign on may 1 first, and adhere to stadards. Everyone that did a redesign could sign up and post before and after screenshots of their website. Which gives a brilliant overview of about 750 newly designed websites.

So, what is hip in webdesign at the moment?

The color green

A lot of redesigns use shades of green. As the colors stand for hope, growth and good health this could be explained by spring and sunshine. It would be an interesting research to see wether green really is more used generally in the spring. This site added some butterflies.

Red is good

But only if it’s really really really red. domestic.net really understood that. But a lot of other sites follow their example.

Colums

Everyone is a fan of colums, with screenresolution growing bigger there is more space horizontally on your screen, and putting everything full of text, well, than you’d better do a new redesign. The obvious trend is colums, columns, columns. Interestingly a lot of people are stepping away from the small menu column on the left, the main content column center, and other stuff in a small column on the right. More and more sites are going for a menu on top, and two small columns on the right. Besides, who said 3 was as many columns you can do? With widescreen coming up we might see a lot more floating designs with mucho columns.

Background color

The vote still isn’t through, black, white, or pick a colour? The background color for text however generally is white, and for the entire site it may be really really red, or green (or any other colour really). With a blackground however the text background often becomes grey. Can’t really decide on a winner in this categorie however. Obviously, there’s always some people that just don’t want to pick and take any colour. Fortunately, I wasn’t able to find any sites with an photo on the background that is repeating. But, some nice background images where used (that site is green again).

Break out of the grid

While people were expecting that more sites ‘break out of the grid’ this still isn’t the case. A table is a obvious case of a grid, which has a strict layout, without colums and such, while with css it is possible to have objects overlap, or take any relative position to each other you like. The only real example of that is this site. And to make matters worse, they’ve actually used tables to make this one.

Personal favorite

Well, after looking at hundred of different sites I of course have my own favorite. I just love the ‘welcome’ on top of the page. Eventhough in most sites I recommend against it. Very nicely done.

Multimedia engineer

Obviously I did not enter in the css Reboot. Complete redesigns are bad for most (commercial) sites as it lowers the customer recognision. And if they do not recognise your site as yours all good will you’ve gotten in the past is gone.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 6:43 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under Webdevelopment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.