This week saw redesigns of a couple of the web’s best-known and (in some ways) influential sites: Cnet’s news.com and salon.com.

Salon’s redesign was – in my mind – way overdue. It was looking – in 2005 – like (the long-lost, yet still-lamented) Suck with sidebars.

The redesign appears (after only one visit), to be unremarkable. Much better looking, more above the fold, a change to a fluid from fixed layout. Vastly improved, but just HTML with better organization and some additional eye candy.

The news.com redesign is more interesting to me for the following reasons (and this is after about a dozen visits; it’s a site I hit numerous times a day):

• First impression: I like it – I remember my first impression(s) of the last redesign of the site was “ick” (it was the old “change is bad!” reflex; I soon saw it was better….). But I like this one out of the box.
• More Ajax Like – While I don’t think they’re actually using AJAX (except possibly in “The Big Picture”), they are using DHTML to get more above the fold and generate interest.
• More graphics – Eye candy goes a long way. This has more, both pics and graphics. I’m on broadband, so I likee!
• The Big Picture – A Flash widget (which may use AJAX [does appear to] ) which shows related stories and so on in a very non-traditional (mesh map) way. I’ve seen this before – Java applets doing much the same – but the first of this kind I’ve seen on any mainstream site. It’ll be interesting to see how this area gets refined (or dropped…)
• More data – They’ve packed a lot into the page, including some personalization features.

Interestingly(?), news.com has – unlike Salon – stuck with a fixed-width layout (as before), but a really wide fixed width. I wonder if they’re doing any JS video-card probing to get resolution?

I dunno, but it’s always interesting to me when a site redesigns. Yes, an opportunity to poke fun at the sites and pretend that I’d never make such a gaffe, but…keeps you up on the Web design zeitgeist.

Trends I’m seeing:

• Denser pages (more text vs. white space/graphics)
• Wider (or more fluid) pages
• Use of AJAX/DHTML/Flash to get more information (rotating, for example) in a given area

And one other very interesting trend I’m seeing: Less and less cookie-cutter design. While bad from Jakob Nielsen’s point of view, the sites I’ve seen redesigned somewhat non-traditionally (such as news.com) are NOT – to me – hard to figure out at all.

But I’m a power user, so that’s not a good use case, let’s say.

Nielsen (and I concur) says non-traditional design may have merit, but look at it this way: People are used to a certain handful of ways of navigating web sites. Even if your (non-traditional) layout is brilliant, people are not going to learn your method.

They are going to bail.

Which is why – for examples – amazon.com and Barnes and Noble are pretty much the same site, but for palette and navigation graphics (functionally roughly the same; just a different “skin”).

But the newish sites – news.com, gmail.com, for examples – have just worked. Because they are different but not too different.

But – to be fair – both of those examples are “for geeks” sites. You have to go back to the WWMMD? factor (What Would My Mom Do? factor).

While the barr keeps rising for the average web user, there will always be 49% of web users who are below average on the web-savvy meter.

Sobering, no?

But the changes I’m seeing are interesting and – for the most part – positive to me. While one could interpret the use of AJAX and DHTML (and – to a degree – Flash) as bad acid flashbacks to the blink tag, marquee, applets, and JS status rollers (when’s the last time you’ve seen one of those?), I’m less skeptical.

And – overall – I’m very skeptical and cynical.

So the web is lookin’ good…I think this internet stuff may just stick around…