Beautiful new BNET.com site

March 8, 2007

CNET just launched a re-design of the BNET.com site and damn is it beautiful. Just very well put together, you’d swear it was a pre-press layout for a nice glossy magazine or something like that.

I think what impressed me most is that a site with so many pieces floating around is done without tables. I did a view-source on their front page and there’s not a single table tag to be found, it’s all CSS positioning. I especially love the fact that with all the CSS going on, the page looks exactly the same on my Windows PC at work (running IE 6) as it does here at home on my Linux box (running Firefox 2.0).

And so far, it does not seem to suffer any of the bugs that some of their other CSS sites have. Like on TechRepublic, especially the Blog page, renders without any content sometimes. I have to hit a refresh and wait for the content to show up inside the framework. Whatever was causing that bug, they seem to have fixed it in BNET’s layout because I haven’t seen that problem at all in the site.

Sigh, it makes me jealous. Our Oracle Portal intranet at work, the site I’m working on, is very rigid about the way it spits out content. Everything gets slapped into tables, there’d be almost no way to shoe-horn a BNET-like layout into the Portal.