No doubt feeling some pressure from our friends across the river, SEPTA rolled out their new homepage this afternoon.

I can't help but think it's a bit of a rush job... for example, clicking the "Regional Rail" link leads you to a blank page. Most of the other services simply lead to another link to click on for the schedule.

The trip planner is still incredibly terrible, but at least there's now a button for Google Transit. If you opt to use the SEPTA Trip Planner, you'll be treated to the old SEPTA.org design.

The maps page now uses an inconsistent mix of interfaces including the Google Maps interface, SEPTA's own imitation of the Google Maps interface (but just using a SEPTA graphic, not Google Maps tiles), and PDF files. There's no longer a way to just see an image of the system map as an image file, only contained within their interface.

Click on a link for "text" on the Regional Rail schedules and you'll get the same thing as if you'd clicked the "PDF" link. TrainView still uses the old design. Hopefully that 3rd space under "Real Time" will soon be filled in with BusView.

It's a major aesthetic and organizational improvement, no doubt. But for the amount of problems I was able to find just clicking around for 5 minutes, SEPTA would have been better to wait until the site was feature-complete before rolling out the new design.

UPDATE: Here's some alternate perspective, courtesy of the comments section.

Not much love for the new site to be found here, eh? I think the new site is MUCH better than the old one, it's much cleaner. RSS, Google transit AND search, standards compliant (well mostly), and a link to Twitter to me shows movement in the right direction. You can still see the individual maps, you just have to know how to do it :) http://septa.org/site/images/700.jpg Also, did you notice the maps on individual station pages: http://septa.org/stations/transit/subway/frtc-b... good stuff. Having said all that, I do have my own pet peeves with a few things, but I'm sure others will be adding them to this site.

While I do agree with the comments about the launch being a little premature: holes in the content and elements using the old design (trainview, careers, etc.), I'm also happy to see that there appears to lots of positive developments going on and hopefully they will continue. A mobile site would be nice.