Slashdot, the venerable "news for nerds" site that has become synonymous with sudden, crippling levels of linkage popularity, is ready for a redesign. Well, not a redesign exactly, more of a face-lift.

Having recently overhauled the site's markup to conform to HTML Strict 4.01, Slashdot has now achieved a more or less clean separation of form and content. And thanks to the well-advertised wonders of CSS, it's now possible for any enterprising designer to develop a new, production-ready (or nearly ready) 'skin' for the site completely on her own.

For an online destination as hugely popular and community-driven as Slashdot, an all-comers design contest becomes a no-brainer. The site is on the verge of sending a general call for entries to all readers and would-be Slashdot art directors for a new, improved visual façade.

Click here to read about recent changes at The Onion.

A quick look at Dave Shea's CSS Zen Garden—where a single page of content has been endlessly reinterpreted by designers through Cascading Style Sheets—gives us a hint as to how dramatically Slashdot can be altered. An astonishing diversity of visual approaches is possible with this approach; without changing even a line of HTML the new Slashdot might not look at all like the old Slashdot.

You could say that the possibilities are endless, but that's not quite true. In his preview of judging criteria for the contest, founder Rob Malda decreed that any worthy contestant must preserve the essential Slashdot look as well as "all the user interface components you see today." The site's information architecture is not up for reconsideration. It's true that "You can move stuff around, or even hide some of it in roll-over menus," but the design brief here does not include the site's functional organization and its behaviors.

Which is fair enough. Rethinking the very structure of the site would be a nontrivial task, one not particularly well suited for an open contest. But what that leaves to contestants amounts to little more than window-dressing. Slashdot is a powerful grassroots brand, but it's not one that has ever built its reputation on aesthetics, and this is a contest that seems to focus squarely and exclusively on improving aesthetics.

Given free reign, a designer could entirely revamp the grid underlying the Slashdot layout, impose stricter and more aesthetically appealing typographic conventions and in general improve the design sensibility from top to bottom. It would make for a significant improvement to the Slashdot user experience, but it would also be a wasted opportunity.

Click here to read about Salon.com's redesign.

Without the freedom to rethink, for instance, Slashdot's comment threading, or its presentation of search results, or its topic pages, the net effect of a redesign will be considerably less impactful than one might hope for: prettier but not sturdier. This is because the linchpin of effective online graphic design—a mindful awareness of architecture and usability—will be hampered by the existing code. There may very well be new improvements to these architectural challenges in development, but even the best design based on today's feature set will have difficulty adapting to significant future changes in the user experience. Like a lot of facelifts, this one may be pleasing at first glance, but will likely prove somehow unsatisfactory after prolonged gaze.

None of which is to say that Slashdot shouldn't be entitled to run this kind of contest, or to implement a simple re-skinning of its content and features as is. On the contrary, this is the kind of contest that makes perfect sense for a technologically savvy forum like Slashdot, because it puts into practice ideas about CSS that remain relatively untested. At the very least, it will be a lucid demonstration of the power (or lack thereof) of visual design in isolation.

But this mode of thinking does highlight a hidden danger of standards-based design: CSS simplifies presentational execution so compellingly that it becomes almost natural to focus too heavily on presentation alone, independent of a more thorough consideration of the user experience. Without CSS, a contest like this wouldn't have been possible, it's true—but it's also unlikely that Slashdot would have looked to overhaul its look and feel without a coordinated effort to rethink its information architecture, too. Call me paranoid, but I like those two disciplines to stick together.

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