My friends on the Microsoft.com Home Page team just released a new home page design. Alex Barnett collects some reviews. I note that the JavaScript code for ClickTrax is gone. The code looks cleaner (though it still uses tables for positioning, it’s gone from using over 40 down to seven, and there are now no spacer gifs!). I know there are developers and designers working on the team who understand modern markup (some of the work is done by the same guys who designed the new UI for Microsoft.com Search) and it’s really starting to show.
Minor quibble: in Safari, there are artifacts around the Microsoft logo in the upper left corner:
Also, I’d have loved to see a more flexible layout—there’s still a big band of unused space around the edges. But these things are going to be easier to do next time out. Well done, folks.