Data Circle

(N.B. I wrote this article a while ago, when the FreeBSD site was first updated, but have only just got around to finishing it and hitting the ‘publish’ button).

The official FreeBSD web site has recently received a makeover as part of Google’s Summer of Code programme. As with most redesigns nowadays, the old site was a hideous collection of tables and HTML that lacked any form of semantics, whereas the new site uses CSS for the layout and styling (although I should point out that the old site did validate as XHTML, so it wasn’t as bad as some people might think).

As someone who has been using FreeBSD for some time, I’ve been a regular visitor to the web site so here’s what I think of the new design compared to the old one. First of all, the front page looks a lot cleaner, there’s less clutter and more whitespace. A lot of the marketing blurb about “what is FreeBSD, what is it good for etc.” has been moved off the home page and now the central content is dominated by news, events and media stories. Personally I think this is a big improvement, because when I go to the home page of any web site I’m generally looking for something specific, so I’d rather be greeted by some well organised links that point me to where I want to go rather than a page of text that doesn’t contain anything of interest.

Overall, I think the new design is a lot better, although I still feel a certain fondness for the old one, which always looked somewhat old school – a bit like FreeBSD.