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Cingular Wireless Redesign
Cingular Wireless recently unveiled a new standards look. The site now utlilizes XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS. The new design is heavy on some JavaScript navigation, however, it does boast a great new look. The site works well in (small testing) IE6 and Netscape 7 on Windows. Opera had a little trouble but came through. Some users have already had trouble with browser issues. If you are still living in the dark and use, say Netscape 4, you might find yourself reading:
If you are reading this message probably you are not using a standard browser. Pages in this site may not be displayed correctly on non-standard browsers. If youwant to download a standard browser, please refer to Web Standard Project site (WaSP) for more information.
The small, but informative caption works quite well as usual. Note again the usual reference to the WaSP (a thanks to those guys for their work).
Plus
Cingular's developers have used lists for transparent submenus, cut out tables (except where appropriate), and used CSS strictly for all style elements. The redesign, as any standards redesign, was definately a huge benefit to Cingular. According to archived pages at the end of last year, the front page has been slimmed down about 49kb; from 70,000 bytes to about 19,500 bytes without the 10kb style sheet. This obviously means less work for their servers. Their site, because of the use of standards markup, is now accessible to more visitors. And their new site is most likely easier to maintain.
Minus
The site doesn't, unfortunately, pass W3C validation, although that may change. Apparently, the site is slow to load, possibly from some large JavaScript files. The site isn't truly accessible; missing alt attribute, so on... Another interesting item is that the site probably isn't so good on that mobile phone you might already have from Cingular, hopefully more work will be done in that area.
Overall, another successful, yet "unfinished" standards redesign. Congrats to the developers at Cingular who chose the path less-traveled. Nonetheless, a good work in the corporate world. And as always, we hope to see more.
