Finally, The All New Apple.com
Launched in parallel with this year’s WWDC is the all new apple.com. I’m not sure about the gradient main menu bar, but there are a few really nice features.
- Nice big bottom - breadcrumb navigation & complete site navigation in the footer. I first saw this on Skype last year, which was hugely successful.
- Beautifully made horizontal scrolling product selection, which works without the fancy javascript - a great example of Progressive Enhancement.
- Very fancy concertinas in the sidebars, which still present their full content without Javascript.
- Apple are now targeting larger screens - 1024 pixels or wider. The previous site targeted 800 pixels.
- Different colour backgrounds to suit content. Some black, some white and others somewhere in between.
I wonder what they’re using for their content management system. Given that Apple’s site has always used custom layouts for each page, rather than an consistent template based layout, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve all just switched to Coda.
I also notice Scriptaculous and references to Mixins in the header, suggesting to me that Rails might be in there somewhere.