Macromedia yesterday rolled out the beta of its new website design. I love the look of this new design, it's very clean, orderly and smart looking. There's really nothing about that aspect of the design to complain about.
However, the ironic thing is that Macromedia has used too much of its own bread-and-butter on this redesign. Primarily, I'm referring to Flash. Quite simply, there's too darn much of it.
As a proof-of-concept and a working example of tight integration between data sources and the StudioMX tools, this redesign soars. But for the end user coming to the site for quick information I think it represents a stumbling block. The various menu styles (some of which break too far away from web standards) can be a bit confusing and also a bit sluggish.
Also, I'm lucky in that I can surf from home and work on a high-speed connection. With so much flash crammed on the homepage, I wonder how the response and load time is for dial-up users. The load time on the homepage for me has been somewhat slow, even via T1 and cable modem.
Macromedia is looking for feedback, though. So you can address praise, comments and/or criticism here. Also, there is information about the new redesign here and a user survey here.
One additional note: despite the bloat, I always think that Macromedia does make great use of stock photography on the homepage; strong, bold images that are very "un-techy" put a nice human face to their products.
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