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Unconstructive nitpick: the text quality in the images on that page is awful. Very aliased, and the letters seem kind of randomly sized and kerned. It's quite s
by vosper 12y ago
Unconstructive nitpick: the text quality in the images on that page is awful. Very aliased, and the letters seem kind of randomly sized and kerned. It's quite strange.
- stevenleeg 12y agoI noticed this as well. It's because they're rendering text in jpegs which is not a great idea for legibility... Strange choice from such a large technology company.
- brenschluss 12y agoYeah, strange. But it makes sense, if you think about it. You're guaranteed that the images work on all devices, especially since mobile browsers are pretty good at resizing images. You don't have to spend time on HTML/CSS. Most importantly, I'm willing to bet that the overlap between people using old computers with IE6 browsers, and businesses interested in using Amazon Business, is greater than we would imagine.
- okbake 12y agoYeah, that stood out to me too. I feel like these were design proofs that someone just threw on the page instead of building them out. Possibly someone who doesn't do much web dev. Even the markup is odd: tables with <br/>'s between them for the image rows and each image link is using an image <map> that spans the entire image instead of just using an anchor.
- sukilot 12y agoAmazon launched years before CSS2. If it ain't broke...
- unfunco 12y agoBut it is broken, the menu is made of images, as is much of the copy. It's not friendly for search (not just search engines, but Cmd + F, etcetera.) – it's not accessible, and it's difficult to read. It is broken. I even checked the URL to make sure it wasn't a phishing attempt. It's very lazy work from Amazon.
- veidr 12y agoSeriously, look at the typographic alignment in the very first word of this paragraph (which happens to be "Amazon"): http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/img15/amazon-business/pages/landing-page/ambz_lp_solut._V306693268_.jpg http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/img15/amazon-busi... It has always seemed freaky to me that Amazon still uses images for paragraphs of text. I have assumed it is because the real-world web is more broken than I know.
- sukilot 12y agoAmazon has an incredibly tightly packed homepage with images and text. that's an obscene challenge to layout without obscuring content or missing up proportions. The inside pages use regular layout and are more liberal
- r00fus 12y agoLuckily for us, their iOS app and mobile browser experience is really nice (only I can't see some comment metadata like up/downvotes). Only time I visit Amazon on a desktop is when I happen to deep-link into a product page from a review site.
- hobs 12y agoLike most Amazon services, its a "will this work and make money, backfill if needed." I have nothing against big A, they often use this strategy to try a bunch of stuff out and see if it works, almost always at a loss, and see how they can make money off of it. Anyone who has looked into Glacier (for instance) will see that Amazon probably didnt buy a bunch of crazy robots, but is more likely selling EC2 at a loss to see if anyone thinks this is a good idea, and then some sort of plan backing it when they see enough volume to care.
- sukilot 12y agoCrazy robots? Isn't Glacier just tape storage? Big companies use regular robots for that.
- fragmede 12y agoAmazon hasn't publicly stated what technology Glacier is based on. It's been speculated that instead of throwing out previous generation AWS hardware, they're simply repurposing then into cheap storage nodes for Glacier.
- EwanToo 12y agoI can well imagine it started that way, but the density of tape over disk makes it seem likely to me that by now they're on custom versions of Spectra tape libraries, which pretty much fits into the "Try selling it, if it sells, make something cheap to run it" philosophy.