For my evaluation I decided to go in depth on a web site that I visit often, CNN.com. Although I believe that FOXNews.com covers the news a little more evenly, I like the look and the feel of the CNN web site more than that of FOX News. To begin, I would like to point out the user-friendliness of the CNN website. You can find just about anything you are looking for within about 3 clicks of the mouse, and your eyes don’t have to wander all over the page to find what you’re looking for. The layout is very hierarchal in design, which is how it should be.
The first problem I found after using the W3C’s online validation tool, was that the main page was missing its Document Type. Here is the three errors it gave me as a result:
Upon further investigation, I found that all of the other 47 errors resulted directly from this simple mistake. Since no Document type was found, the W3C validator reverted to its default SGML mode. This caused all of the other errors that really aren’t errors, to appear. The web page was designed to be HTML 4.01 Transitional, and I believe that if the correct declaration was inserted into the header, all of the errors would go away.
The only problem I really found with CNN’s layout was deciding whether I prefer to view the site with styles on or off. Go to the page yourself and see what I mean. The layout is so easy to decipher and search through, even when all CSS styling has been disabled. CNN is a model of how a site should be organized.
CSS is a different story. Using the W3C’s CSS validator, I found 229 errors! Once again however, I find that I can’t stay made at CNN for very long, for they are not to blame for their horrible CSS syntax near the end of their file. So you might ask, who is to blame? The answer will not shock you…MICROSOFT. While perusing their “common.css” file, I found that all of the entries that showed as errors, were all due to “hacking” of the CSS file so that the page would display properly in IE6. SURPRISE!!! Once again, we see the importance of a set of uniform guidelines. If everyone (meaning Microsoft) would conform to these guidelines, errant lines of code would not have to show up in our CSS and HTML documents.
I know that most people probably chose sites who could use a good make-over, but CNN.com was a model of design. I really have a hard time finding anything in the site that could use improvement, other than their general bias towards the leftists. But that hardly has anything to do with site design.
