Every now and then I see a website design that is so incredible, I want to rip it off for myself. With it’s very 2.0 feel, easy navigation, and incredible iconology, bnet.com is one of them.
This business site owned by Cnet (one of our more savvy clients as USWeb) loads fast, and has some amazing design work. The home page navigation is what all site should strive for. A lot of redundant navigation options, but very simple and clean. The individual article pages are very fun and oddly engaging in a nearly interactive way. They remind me of a the Head First series from O’Reilly.
The site even makes very logical use of tagging, where as a lot of sites these days seem to be trying to force the tagging folksonomy into situations where it looks out of place.
There are a couple of minor issues with the site that I should point out. First off, over 500 errors on the home pages according to W3C. it’s a shame that such an elegant design wasn’t treated better in the code. But, there doesn’t seem to be any issues rendering on Firefox, and it loads quickly. The only way to notice the errors that i can see is to actually check.
I would also love to see a bit more work put into the search optimization. There is so much potential for sites created in this fashion. Unfortunately Cnet hasn’t asked us to take a look at this site yet. I hope they do, I would love to work on this one.
Other than those couple of issues, this site is perfect. It’s now one of my favorite business sites and it really does offer great advice for professionals . Although I’m guessing that level of custom illustration will be hard to maintain long term, I’ll enjoy it for now. Who ever designed this site, congrats on really knocking it out of the park.
[tags]bnet, cnet, design, web, business[/tags]
