Amtrak and Orbitz in Style

Joining the ranks of travel sites using CSS, we have Orbitz and Amtrak Guest Rewards. Great work on both, with just a few knots and kinks:

Orbitz, my own favored travel site, has done an excellent job cleaning up their tabs-and-curves look, simplifying front page elements to just the essentials, but the arrangement of some of those fields is broken in Opera 7.50, most notably the “To / City name and airport code” detail, and the dropdowns for Travelers, which should be in an unbroken row. Unfortunately, the tabs still seem to be images in a div named “top-tabs” rather than in a styled unordered navigation list, but I suppose that is forgivable.

Amtrak Guest Rewards has also cleaned up the look, but I get a bit lost at first between the horizontal navigation bar and the sidebar menu. They appear to have made more important account management links appear in the horizontal bar, while leaving the sidebar for other program and promotional info. The navigation bar is a plain string of pipe-separated menu options, while the sidebar is a set of styled unordered lists. Another source of confusion: when I click on “Account Activity” or “My Profile” to get to my account info, I’m greeted with a huge blue-and-white arrow pointing right at “Q&A” in the navigation bar. It takes a few seconds to realize that the arrow is pointing beyond the navbar to the upper-right login form. Best fix for that would be a duplicate login form in a prominent place in the main div.

Very nice. Maybe neither site validates perfectly, but I’d say the revolution is definitely under way, and has been for some time now.