Kevin Lynch Archives

New Macromedia.com

The new site was over a year in the making, designed to push the boundaries of what's possible with the site experience. The team explored a ton of design directions, did a lot of usability testing, and worked to balance the page paradigm with application metaphors. This exploration of what is an application, what is content, and what is really a combination is a big part of the adventure, and is what we continue to tune. The second beta of the site is now live, responding to the early feedback on beta 1. There's also a great progress report by Al Ramadan on what we've learned so far.

Over 70% of visitors to the Macromedia site have a high bandwidth connection (DSL or better), but the aim is to work well over 56K modems, which is what our performance metrics are tested against--beta 2 has marked performance improvements. In some cases it even preloads areas that we expect you'll visit before you go there to improve response time. The site is built with Macromedia Studio MX, ColdFusion MX, Flash Remoting, XHTML, CSS and a blending of XHTML and Flash (beginning in the early days with pre-release versions of all the MX software).

There are also some interesting documents about the site design, the story behind the new site, and how we've used rich internet applications. The team looks forward to any feedback you have on the new site!