The absolute worst web design trend of 2009 is this header background that extends beyond the container and makes it look like the header is on a piece of paper that has been folded around the background. Let me show you what I'm talking about: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/yP7CH.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/yP7CH.png</a><p>It's a silly and needless ornamentation that wasn't cool or interesting when the first person did it, and became even more worthless and boring with each successive use. Bahhumbug!<p>I'll hug it and kiss it and apologize if I see it used in a way even remotely relevant to the context of the content, or integrated into the visual language of the design (e.g. on a blog about origami), but until then, I'm a hater. I'd rather see drop shadows under blinking text; at least that would be quasi-original.<p>Also, the blue logo area pops so ridiculously hard it makes it impossible to keep my attention focused on the rest of the page. I'd tone it down to a smooth #80a7d3, like you see in the image I linked above.<p>EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled w3 finally redesigned the site; on first impression it appears to be a marked improvement.
It looks a bit like a generic domain squatters landing page. No soul. Before it showed clearly that passionate programmers where at work. Now it looks like a "design job". A bit too much for my taste.
The uppermost nav menu is a blob of text, the nav item "standards" is repeated (Standards, STANDARDS, standards, <i>S</i>T<i>A</i>N<i>D</i>A<i>R</i>D<i>S</i>) like the date of a monster truck rally, and there's no obvious difference between left-nav and top-nav. It looks like a blog from 2005 viewed in a browser with the wrong fonts. Who designed it?
Not really a fan. The W3C does so much that their past homepages have suffered from a mass of undifferentiated links. This design attempts to solve the problem by taking down the number of links, but the dearth of contrast and colour means it's still very hard to tell what's important, what's time-sensitive, and what's always there.
I'm tempted to say that index.html should be an index. You know 1994-style blue links in <li>'s in a nice hierarchy and nothing else. The old site used to be like that, deep linking from the front page to the specs etc. and a newsfeed in the middle. For some reason, I hate this new design. Maybe it's just "We fear change!"
why are the left and top menus (standards, participate, ...) the same? that seems very odd for an otherwise fairly professional-looking page.<p>edit: and why have the "pointer" point to yet another instance of the word "standards" rather than the one in the top menu? i know it's way better than it was, but it seems odd to be so much better and yet still have odd things like that...
They're using PHP and Smarty, from looking at comments in the source code.<p>I find it highly ironic that the people in charge of web standards and consistency use the programming language with least consistent syntax.