ENN Revamps

ENN has been around for years.
So has its current design (or at least I get that feeling)
I don’t have any issues with the current design, though I don’t get exactly excited about it either.
They’re currently preparing to unveil a new design, but have made the new design available for everyone to see in advance.
That’s a brave move to make!
In any case the new design is very different from the current site.
In some ways that is a very good thing, however it’s not in others.
Let’s examine it a bit more closely.
Basic Accessibility
Both the current and new versions of the site are usable using a text-based browser (lynx). The new one is slightly easier to get around, however.
HTML Validation
The old version does not validate and neither does the new version.
The old version of the site made full use of the screen real estate, but the new one has loads of white space around it.
On a lower screen resolution it probably looks ok, but on my monitor it just looks plain silly
There are also some really odd design decisions that break usability.
The story titles are bolded, but they’re not hyperlinked (even SiliconRepublic managed to get that right!), so you have to click on the “more” link to actually get to the story.
In common with so many sites these days, they’ve added “web 2.0” elements so that you can “digg” stories directly from the page and they’ve also given their RSS feeds greater prominence.
From an SEO perspective, however, they’ve really missed the point and seem to have regressed. All the news stories have the same page title! I won’t even start on the filenames!
It’s a shame that they didn’t address some of those issues, but maybe they will before the site actually goes live.