Kudos on good web design

So as everyone’s noticed by now, the Straight Dope has a new look on the main page, with everything laid out with fancy formatting and sidebars and the like. But today, I noticed something else about it. Earlier, the server was very slow in responding, and apparently, something in the webpage coding choked. Instead of the fancy new layout, I saw this.

Now, I’m not complaining about the slow response, or the failure of the fancy rendering: That happens from time to time. What this thread is for is to congratulate whoever put that page together, for sticking with good web design principles. See, even though the Javascript or whatever handles the layout failed, all of the content of the page was left intact. What was left was enough to enable a user to visit any area of the site, and get the content out. You see that sort of robust design all too rarely nowadays, and it’s nice to see it here.

So, to Jerry or whoever it is who put that page together, thank you for building a sound, robust webpage.

Hmmm. I’m not a computer guy, so it took a little extra reading for me to understand what you are saying. And yep, from what I now know about “functionality” you are correct. Cool.

Not to start a new thread about such a trivial thing, but I like the look of the new banner on the main page, and I think it would be nice to see it at the top of the SDMB as well. It isn’t immediately obvious that the banner links to www.straightdope.com, so having those Learn/Read/Ask links could be useful to people who stumble onto the boards but have never seen/heard of the newspaper articles! And I just like the gradient in the title.