Store Norske Leksikon

Finally it was decided that they would offer this service (Norwegian) for free. And surely there isn’t much you can complain about when it comes to content. Now that they even opened for user-contributed content I am sure we’ll see that this will quickly expand and in time it might even be able to compete with Wikipedia on Norwegian articles. That being said, I am amazed that they decide to offer this kind of service in such a shabby shape. The webpage looks like something thrown together in the last minute, the placement of the various elements are aweful and surely they haven’t put much effort into branding themself in a good way. If this were mine design project I would rather jump out a window before handing this of for public appearance. There are several links around the webpage that doesn’t even work. For instance, when you enter an article, they have this big sign in the upper-right corner of the content area, saying quality proofed. This sign has a link attached to it, clicking it just leads to a webpage saying no such publication.

Futhermore the usage of gradients and the colors they chose to go with it is far from the best combination I’ve seen. The placement of ADs looks like they just got a bunch of ADs they wanted to place, and placed them a bit here and there, caring little to nothing for the design. The usage of popular elements based on prototype like ballon tooltips and such is a good idea, but the design on the ballons are aweful. Taking a look at the source of the main page shows that this is a quick product when the developer(s) didn’t even care to remove bug comments. So to speak, the content here is absolutely thrilling, and I would love to see this wrapped in a good design, and not something a 14 year old kid came up with – 7 for usefulness, 1 for design – but I think I’ll keep to Wikipedia.

• Check it out at www.snl.no
• VG.no article (norwegian)
• DinSide.no article (norwegian)
• ITPro.no article (norwegian)
• Dagbladet.no article (norwegian)