Whilst reading blog I found this link. I have yet to read it but the idea is quite funny anyway.

Basically, there’s a new manga series called Afganisu-tan featuring various Middle Eastern and Eastern European countries as animated characters.

A couple of the websites I regularly frequent have rolled out changes to their site design.

BBC New (about)

I noticed these changes this morning but they don’t seem to have cascaded throughout all the pages yet. The main noticeable change is that the whole layout is now centred in the browser window; it’s about time really! The whole left-aligned web design has been somewhat out of date for a few years in my opinion. The second change is that the new design uses a lot more whitespace than previously, which is a welcome change – another feature that I believe websites should be implementing. With the old design, news stories with multiple links to videos, photos and related links below the main text description appeared slightly cramped.

I do feel though that it does feel a little messy in places. I suppose with any website that has so much content to publish, the placement of navigation links, headlines, features, commentary and what not can be a major task. It may take some time before I feel comfortable with the new design.

Amazon UK (about)

So I checked out Amazon for a little market research last night (read: trying to find a website with Mario Kart Wii still available for pre-order) when I noticed the redesign. The first thought that popped into my head was whether I had typed the address in wrong or that through some bizarre sequence of events I had fallen into some strange phishing trap. Fortunately, it was neither.

The redesign itself is quite appealing. I like the larger search text field at the top. The navigation links are also very intuitive. To be honest I can’t really remember how I navigated the site previously by I do know that they’ve fully removed the top horizontal navigation for each of the departments. They’ve also changed the colours a bit.

As with the BBC News site, it may take a little while to familiarise myself with all the changes but I don’t have any major gripes with the change.

What do you guys think of the new designs? Does my site layout need a little refreshing?