Alexa: Just… No.
Yesterday I noticed that Alexa has once again changed their design…. kind of. They’ve been doing this every couple of weeks for a while now, and they’ve officially hit the low.
First off, the advertisments they added in one of these changes are horribly placed and just butcher their already sub par design. Seriously, should a huge site like Alexa, owned by a huge company like Amazon have to use AdBrite? Over 100,000 unique visits a day and they can’t get some private advertisers?
Their latest design, which just because I have Photoshop open I have capped for you (it could change at any second!) is pretty much… I don’t know. It’s hard to put into words how much that drop shadow at the top hurts me inside. Amazon can afford to shell out thousands of dollars for a good design, so why don’t they? Stop getting your programming department to design your website!
So as you can see, anyone with a Photoshop 7.0 30 day trial could’ve bettered this. Once could argue, “But the design is right for the site!” but that’s impossible! Alexa has been cycling through so many tweaks, major changes and… this for ages now. Then there is their constant changing of the way they display their traffic graphs…
So what’s the big improvement? What really was the need to change this? Now, I’m all for change. New designs, back end, whatever, usually I like it. You can tell here because the last version was the longest running one at a couple of months. But change is only something you should do when you need it. And in moderation. Did the Alexa graphs need changing? Well, you could say yes. They weren’t perfect, and they should be. Are they perfect now, after these changes? No way.
And then there’s Alexa’s incompatibility with Firefox. It’s an open source browser! How hard could it be for a group of people, having already developed toolbars for IE not be able to do it for the browser that they likely use personally. I’d gladly use it if they came out with it. I haven’t used my StumpleUpon bar in a while, so I wouldn’t be adding on any space.
So in the end I think Alexa just needs to get a really good designer and rethink their whole approach here. And that drop shadow…
Leave a comment
Razor
May 12th, 2007 at 11:47 AM
that drop shadow hurts me !
L3ggy
May 12th, 2007 at 2:00 PM
Same, They changed it to blue now aswell. But why?
Josh Buckley
May 13th, 2007 at 4:55 AM
@L3ggy, no each page differentiates the colors if you navigate around a bit.
I personally don’t have too much problem with the new layout, apart from that heavy drop shadow which attracts my focus… that part doesn’t work.
Penis Monster
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:40 PM
niggerfaggot!
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