Kmart redesigned their website and launched it anew this week. My first impression: fat man in a little jacket — no room to breathe.
The problem with liquid layout on a content-heavy website, is that I often resize my browser wide to give space and proportion to the information. When a site like Kmart uses a liquid layout, I feel claustrophobic. It’s like walking in a too-crowded department store with stuff piling higher and higher around you.
However, they did use flyout navigation, ala Jakob Nielsen’s recommendation.
The CSS appears to be formatted well on one of the files, but the others just appear to be slopped together (can anyone say, “Style Guide”). The HTML is table-free, which is nice. But, like most all large corporation sites, it lacks semantic markup: “rl_” to signify right-to-left on id’s and classes.
Maybe this is just my own anal-retentive issue, but should a large-corporation website require semantic markup if they are going to recode every time they redesign?
