Ouch. FoxNews.com just implemented a redesign and boy, something’s broken. I found the “story” talking about their “totally new, crisp” format and found an e-mail address at the bottom for feedback. Here’s the $0.02 that I sent in:

I just flipped over to foxnews.com this morning and was a little shocked to see the new design… it literally looks like the stylesheet didn’t come down with the content. I had to refresh a couple of times to be sure. There are serious rendering issues (both with the home page and story pages) in browsers other than IE/Win (Firefox on both PC/Mac as well as Safari on Mac), many links do not work (over half the main menu bar, besides rendering half-wrapped, doesn’t allow clicks), text is cut off in strange places, etc. Overall, the site design looks incomplete and unfinished, not to mention untested in anything other than IE/Win. Even on that single platform the design doesn’t look complete, making the user think the whole page hasn’t loaded.

I’m sure you have statistics that indicate that the majority of your readership use IE/Win still, but other, much more standards compliant browsers are increasing in popularity, and with IE7 is released, this design will probably be broken there as well. The prior foxnews.com design was very consistent across browsers and platforms. This one looks rushed into production.

“totally new”? yes. “crisp”? not so much.

Please reconsider.

Yours,
Steve DeVoll
Plano, TX

As I told them, I did try the new design in a number of browsers both on Mac and PC. Internet Explorer 6 for Windows was the only browser that came close to rendering a complete design, or at least what I can infer they were going for. The rest were jumbled, had cut off or overlapping areas, or parts of the page that just didn’t work.

Completely unacceptable in this day and age for a major website to not even come close to rendering properly in Firefox, much less other CSS2 compliant browsers.

Of course, part of the problem can probably be attributed to the massive amounts of doubleclick supplied advertising on the site. It’s hard to say where the site ends and the advertising picks up… it’s all squashed together.

Ugh.