Today I read an article on Mashable called 11 Outstanding Online Resources for Web Developers. #4 on the list being devshed.com, which I have to agree is a pretty useful website resource. But one thing that strikes me as odd is how ugly this site is, it feels like a site stuck in 2001.
If you compare the site to any other on the list, its in its own category of ugliness and for a site that gets an average of 250k visitors a month according to compete.com it is quite surprising that it hasnt been redesigned. According to compete, it also looks like their traffic is on the decline – so perhaps offering a new, much more usable website would really benefit and perhaps even boost their traffic.
I find the homepage colors bland and the gradients on the left hand navigation make the text links pretty hard to read. If you click through on individual article, the hierarchy of text is hard to follow – with ads jammed into empty spaces. Some of the graphics feel old, blocky, and outdated.
Even a simple redesign could really help this site, unless they are held back by having no cms or something along the lines of that? It would be interesting to see a few people take a stab at doing a mockup redesign. I’d be tempted to contact the site owners and ask why they have held out so long.
Niels Bom
July 9th, 2010 at 5:06 am
Amen! That is one fugly website.