I could provide a screenshot, but it'll be easier to just see for yourself. The new look has several advantages over the old one:

Better for Googlers

Having learned that a large proportion of our hits come from people who find modules as a result of searching on Google or some other search engine, we wanted to do a better job of drawing people into our site and getting them to explore beyond that first module. Towards that end the new look features:

Logo on top

We moved the Connexions logo from the bottom to the top to gain more name recognition and let people know what site they're on

Search box

We added a Search box to the page header so you can find more Connexions content directly from the module or course

Link display

Modules now directly display links to similar content and courses, instead of linking off to a search results page. Hopefully more people will follow them since we've removed one level of clicking

About/Content links

The page header now has links for learning more about Connexions

Better markup

We wanted to take this opportunity to cleanup the XHTML markup and make it validate if possible. Well, we did manage to clean it up and it almost validates. There are a few niggling issues preventing us from achieving complete validation. One is the problem with namespaces. The W3C validator (or any DTD-based validator for that matter) doesn't recognize any extra namespaces (like say the MathML namespace) in your markup. We've also done some not-nice things putting headings inside lists that we'll have to fix, but that's actually in the XSL for the content, not the new look.

One of the benefits of having cleaner markup is better display in browsers that don't have good support for CSS. By moving the markup for the sidebar to the end of the file and positioning it with CSS, people with text-based browsers (or screen-readers) will get the content first and not have to wade through a bunch of navigation. Max has some further improvements that will make the content look good even in Netscape4. How he did it is beyond me.

More usable

We performed some small usability studies a la Steve Krug on the new look. Almost without exception the users preferred the new design to the old one. There were some other interesting results that I'll cover in a future entry.

Miscellaneous improvements

Lots of little things as well, like:

• A link to the Table of Contents when you're viewing a module in the context of a course
• Authors listed at the top so they get more recognition
• Moving the Edit-In-Place link to the sidebar
• Adding the word (PDF) to the PRINT link, hoping that more people will understand what it means

What's missing

I thought about giving a prize to the first reader to spot the features that didn't get put into the new look, but decided just to list them instead:

• Find other content by this author
• The sidebar "push-pin" for fixing it in position
• The Playland stylesheet

Except for the push-pin these will be making a comeback in the near future.