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December 05, 2005

Adobe logo on Macromedia.com and other Changes

Well, if you've seen the site this morning, you've probably noticed some changes. It's a pretty big day around here, both an end and a beginning. But I'll leave the philosophical rhapsodizing for another day, and instead write a bit about the changes on the site itself.

When I first heard about the Adobe acquisition, my thoughts naturally turned to the site (now sites, at least for the time being). What would happen to macromedia.com? It became quickly apparent in meetings with the folks over at Adobe that we couldn't do any real integration of the sites until after we were one company (we had to act as two separate companies until the deal closed, and there were many things we just couldn't talk about). So while for Day 1 we decided to keep changes to a minimum as far as content was concerned, we wanted to make a visual change on macromedia.com, to communicate to users that a change had occurred, and that Macromedia was now Adobe.

A CSS Reskin

More then two years ago we made the move to a totally CSS driven presentation layer for the site [1]. We did this for many reasons: better accessibility, lighter weight pages, adherence to standards, etc. But one important reason was the separation of content from presentation, and the ability to change the look of the site without changing the code on every single page of the site. And that's what we did last night.

All the reskin changes were handled via CSS. Granted, we didn't make any drastic changes, basically just changing the color palette, but it was still an accomplishment to get the whole site, including all old content and all the applications (including the Flash apps, like the online store), reskinned and deployed. This was the first real test of how the site would respond to global changes like that, and while it certain wasn't trivial, it was definitely easier then it has been in the past, and with our modular CSS structure, we didn't have to make the same changes in multiple places.

Thanks

In the weeks and months ahead I'm sure there will be lots of work to do, and I'm ready to get started. But for now I would like to thank every member of my team who worked so hard on this launch. I really feel like all the work we put into developing the site structure really paid off.

Update: My colleague David Hatch has a nice post here about some of the strategy and user experience thinking that went into our launch.

 

Note: Here's a brief overview of the site that details some of that work. [return]

Posted by nstraghalis at December 5, 2005 06:17 AM

Comments

Neil and Team,

Great job with the reskinning! I appreciate the plan for gradual change of the Macromedia.com site over time which communicates both the new company name and maintains ties with the Macromedia content.

Thanks for sharing a bit about how you did it. It sure demonstrates the value of styling with CSS!

Cam

Posted by: Cam at December 5, 2005 09:57 PM

Sorry to say, but using Internet Explorer 6 on a PC, the changes (even with a few refreshes) don't work so well... the home page logo is the same, the framework on the rounded edged boxes isn't lined up, the background gradient isn't to the bottom anymore and instead there's about a 200px grey box at the bottom. It's almost like it's not a full implementation of the new style sheets.

Posted by: steve at December 6, 2005 09:06 AM

"Sorry to say, but using Internet Explorer 6 on a PC, the changes (even with a few refreshes) don't work so well..."

Dump your cache man. IE is notorius for loading from cache even on refresh... Or better yet - use Firefox ;-)

As for the site... Its a shame Macromedia didnt aquire Adobe. Maybe then we'd see the drop of the horrid Adobe site design. Oh well... As long as no one goes discontinuing Fireworks ill be a happy camper.

Posted by: Anthony at December 6, 2005 09:39 AM

By default IE has always used.

Tools -> Internet Options -> General (tab) -> (temporary internet) Settings -> Automatically.

'Automatically' has been buggy for the 6+ years I've observed it and needs to be changed to "every visit to the page" in order to not cache pages.

I suspect this is a remnant from the old days of most users being on dial-up as it does offload a bit of processing to the client.

Posted by: Richard Taylor at December 6, 2005 12:20 PM

The color palette (not pallet! :-) changes are subtle yet definitely different. I notice a background gradient that now starts with white, what seems to be a white background for the second-level nav bar and ... that's it? Links and highlight colors seem the same. Is the h3 background different?

Congratulations.

Posted by: S Page at December 11, 2005 02:41 AM

Thanks S, I've corrected the typo above, one of the problems of relying too much on spell check.

And yes, the h3 background is a different color, but links and highlights are the same.

Posted by: Neil Straghalis at December 11, 2005 11:28 PM