W3C Launches Beta Of New Website Redesign

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) announced a redesign of their decades old website.

The redesign is currently in Beta but open for a public preview and feedback, with a launch date of later in 2023.

W3C Website

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the non-profit organization that develops web standards.

The current web design, which dates to late 2008, is attractive but also a little dated.

Possibly because the site is manged by different groups that publish sub-sites, some pages on the current site were never updated and are still using the pre-2009 design.

New W3C Web Design

The new design looks modern, although the W3C logo remains the same.

For example, the current W3C homepage is a face-full of text.

The new beta homepage is easier on the eyes and allows for white space.

The W3C website is enormous, consisting of numerous sub-sites that are managed by different people.

A site: search of W3.org shows over 600,000 webpages.

Redesigning the site was a huge undertaking because of the scale but also because of the goal to be accessible and easy to navigate.

A blog post about the new design shared:

“This covers how we started with design, content and technology audits, reviewing who uses the W3C website, what needs to be communicated, and how it’s currently managed (it’s complex!).

The work evolved into design, CMS selection, front-end development, user testing, accessibility work, design systems, technical build of the front-end site in Symfony, browser and accessibility testing (with DAC and Zoonou), and more.”

Understandably, rough edges in the new beta website remain.

I did a partial crawl of the beta site and discovered over a hundred needless redirects caused by coding links to the wrong URL.

Over two thousand pages link to this URL:

https://beta.w3.org/translations/

Which redirects to this URL:

https://beta.w3.org/Translations/

Hopefully the intention is to standardize URLs so they all use lower case and that some of the URLs are yet to be converted to lower case.

Browsing the new site is easy. Site navigation is intuitive.

It’s also a pleasure to read.

The announcement stated about their goals:

“The goals of the redesign are to achieve a cleaner and modern look and greater usability, better accessibility, as well as ultimately simplifying how the site is managed.

We also want to offer integrated Japanese and Chinese versions, which we will roll out after the beta of the English site has concluded.”

It’s safe to say that they’ve succeeded.

The site is still in beta so it’s to be expected that the site isn’t perfect.

All are invited to preview the beta version of the site and offer feedback.

Read the official W3C announcement:

W3C Launches Beta of its New Website

Visit the newly redesigned beta site

W3C Beta