As a spin-off of the EE-powered Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress site, the thinktank’s director asked for a personal site for his newspaper columns (which constitute one of the sections at the ICSEP site). The new subsite is now up at danieldoron.com.

The layout is a slightly-simplified version of the original ICSEP one. I know, it’s still all tables, all the time, but the thing was made back in 2001 and it ain’t broke so we haven’t fixed it.

The design is straightforward, though I did want a subtly comic-booky feel for some reason—perhaps in contrast with the rather serious economics-oriented content.

The two main features I guess are that a) everything is available from the 1, 2, 3 then 4-column homepage (which has both usability advantages and drawbacks I know) and b) with javascript rollovers the links are all large—the story’s entire teaser—so that the user doesn’t have to aim the mouse very precisely to navigate.

Feedback appreciated.

If I click on an article (using Safari on Mac OS X) I get a

If I click on the title of the article I do get the requested article. Slightly confusing…

Codewise, for a site built in late 2005, this is pretty grim I’m sorry to say (and that’s not even mentioning the 84 validation errors on the homepage alone).
Tables, font tags and lots of inline javascript, you name it it’s all here…
I’m curious why you didn’t use one of the EE templates as a starting point?
As an EE implementation it’s pretty good, but as a website I’m not too impressed, sorry I don’t mean to be harsh…

Hi, thanks for looking. Fixed the File Not Found error.

As I wrote above, it was built in 2005 but based on templates from a site built in 2001. That’s my excuse for all the grimness of tables, font tags and inline javascript: it works on the client’s browser and he said hold off on the internal fixes and updates, just get the spin-off site working quickly and dirtily.

It would be nice to redo the site’s two templates from scratch in CSS. Would be pretty simple—much simpler than all these nested tables, and the page would load faster. When I can I will.