For a site that has many articles about usability and user experience, their site isn’t usable at all. People go to their site to read interesting and unique content, but their recent design work takes a step in the exact opposite direction.

Overwhelming Advertisements

Their homepage looks pretty but focuses very little on their unique content. No focus on content for a blog = bad user experience. I’m here to look at your articles, not your ads. I understand having ads there to generate revenue for your hard work. I’m not disappointed in the ads existence but rather I’m disappointed by the sheer number of ads.

Their individual article pages are even worse! Fullscreen on my MacBook and this is how much content is displayed. Let me highlight the parts an average reader of Smashing Magazine would be interested in.

My rough calculations put the useful content as 89,000 pixels out of a total of 823,880 pixels. That is 11% of my entire screen! It is unacceptable to waste 89% of your reader’s screen on unnecessary elements. Waste 20% at the most with advertisements and anything not absolutely critical to the usability of your site.

You might be able to count the navigation and search as useful parts. That would bring the total up to 193,000 useful pixels. Still a paltry 23% of the screen is useful on an article page.

Buggy Browsers

Not supporting IE6 is okay in my book, but you shouldn’t make their experience completely unusable. Instead of worrying about support for the dying browser, serve up an unstyled version of the site instead. The people on IE6 visiting Smashing Magazine, a blog devoted to pushing the boundaries of the internet, probably have no choice to upgrade. They are the ones browsing Smashing Mag during their lunch break at XYZ Corporation dreaming of greener pastures.

Safari Bug Hunting

If you’re going to push the boundaries what is capable on websites, make sure your own website displays correctly in modern browsers. Above is a screenshot of my main browser, Safari 4.0.3. There is an error in the CSS that makes it almost impossible to click on the “read more” links.

Not All Bad

The new navigation is great. It’s clear, simple and padded. The category dropdown is easy to use and saves a lot of screen space. This is the best improvement to the new Smashing Magazine.

This illustration on the footer gives me a sneak peek at what the guys and girls behind Smashing Mag look like. This helps to make it more personable, memorable and fun.

Overall

The redesign of Smashing Mag is 2 steps forward and 8 steps backward. Their following (170,000+ people!) would benefit more from an increased amount of content on the page (with necessary whitespace) and not an increase in the ad space, especially on the article page.

Will I stop reading their articles and writing for them? Absolutely not. Their authors put out some great content and it’s a shame that the unique content wasn’t the focus of the new design. I’ll be comfortably reading Smashing Mag from my RSS reader from now on.