Of all the sort of needless website redesigns I've seen, this one is actually pretty decent. Having gone through this sort of thing a few times myself, I want to give kudos to those who worked on this.
In case they are reading this, here's what I liked and what I think can be approved upon:
LIKED:
- Besides the interactive examples, it looks like you stuck to using standard web fonts instead of loading some bullspit Typekit or Google Font Loader thing. Thumbs up!
- Thanks for dark mode!
- Overall the design is minimalistic. Thanks for not trying to impress everyone with "modern" design or l33t JavaScript skillz.
- Thanks for keeping MDN alive!
THINGS THAT CAN BE IMPROVED:
- The branding is less distinctive than it was before. It's definitely not bad, but the bold monospace "MDN" was more distinctive and made me feel like I wasn't on some rando site. (In fact, that logo still is visible at the footer of the page.)
- I'm not the biggest fan of the 3-column layout. Again, it's not bad, but I think I could totally do without the right-hand column and give the main content more horizontal space. Remember that your site is for developers, and I think most developers are fairly pragmatic about how much content they want to see on-screen at a time.
- The left-hand column is a bit weird. I'm not sure how much of a benefit the scrollbar provides and it also seems to jump when you get to the bottom of the page, which is distracting.
- As others have mentioned, the compatibility table seems nerfed. Definitely don't get rid of it, but I think making it more useful would have gotten more people a positive view of the new page design. If that feature provided a little more info so that I only resorted to caniuse.com 1/3 of the time as opposed to 2/3 of the time, that'd be a good win.
- Remove the hover effects for the top menu items in favor of revealing details on hover/click. Hover is the devil even on desktop; I hate it when I casually drag my cursor from the URL bar down to the page and suddenly some page element appears and covers up what I'm trying to look at.
In case they are reading this, here's what I liked and what I think can be approved upon:
LIKED:
- Besides the interactive examples, it looks like you stuck to using standard web fonts instead of loading some bullspit Typekit or Google Font Loader thing. Thumbs up!
- Thanks for dark mode!
- Overall the design is minimalistic. Thanks for not trying to impress everyone with "modern" design or l33t JavaScript skillz.
- Thanks for keeping MDN alive!
THINGS THAT CAN BE IMPROVED:
- The branding is less distinctive than it was before. It's definitely not bad, but the bold monospace "MDN" was more distinctive and made me feel like I wasn't on some rando site. (In fact, that logo still is visible at the footer of the page.)
- I'm not the biggest fan of the 3-column layout. Again, it's not bad, but I think I could totally do without the right-hand column and give the main content more horizontal space. Remember that your site is for developers, and I think most developers are fairly pragmatic about how much content they want to see on-screen at a time.
- The left-hand column is a bit weird. I'm not sure how much of a benefit the scrollbar provides and it also seems to jump when you get to the bottom of the page, which is distracting.
- As others have mentioned, the compatibility table seems nerfed. Definitely don't get rid of it, but I think making it more useful would have gotten more people a positive view of the new page design. If that feature provided a little more info so that I only resorted to caniuse.com 1/3 of the time as opposed to 2/3 of the time, that'd be a good win.
- Remove the hover effects for the top menu items in favor of revealing details on hover/click. Hover is the devil even on desktop; I hate it when I casually drag my cursor from the URL bar down to the page and suddenly some page element appears and covers up what I'm trying to look at.