juno.co.uk

[James]

I think I mentioned earlier in the year that one of my favourite sites is the rather minimal http://www.juno.co.uk

No graphical beauty at all - it's all text - but it gives me quick access to all the latest record releases with scans of the covers and mp3 samples. Delivery is always next working day. It doesn't quite replace the thrill of thumbing through crates of records in a Soho store basement, but it certainly means I do most of my record shopping from my armchair.

Anyway they have redesigned the site, in beta at the moment: http://beta.juno.co.uk

Still low on graphics but they've added some colour and I think the navigation is spot on. The old site had to be navigated mainly using the back button but the new nav is "always on".

I give it the thumbs up - purely from a usability point of view. The only error I spotted was the date - 33rd September indeed!

[Tom]

And what about blue lettering on a blue background? Hard on the eyeballs.

[David]

Well, you all know that I'm a fan of single hue colour schemes and drop-down menus, so this site scores well by those criteria. However, there are a few points I would make.

Tom is right about blue text on blue but it's not the colour, it's the contrast. There isn't enough contrast between the links and the darker background. There is also too much contrast between the alternating stripes and it is quite distracting. Underlined hyperlinks don't work so well at small text sizes because they make the text hard to read (Ctrl+Scroll is not possible here). I would use text-decoration:none and then use underline for a:hover. This would also help to identify the links as links because at the moment, there is no change as you move over them.

The horizontal bar with "about juno records" etc. is distracting. At first glance it could be confused with Google AdWords since the format and text font/size are the same. I would put this information in a vertical left-hand bar and start with "what's new" at the top.

There are a few other minor quibbles such as the fact that the images could be a little sharper - the text is a bit fuzzy and the banner shows distinct banding (no excuse for that).

Apart from that, I quite like it.