Recent (Mostly Standards-Based) Work

June 17, 2005 | 12 Comments

It’s funny, I remember a time, not that long ago, when any business Web site that even looked towards Web standards was called out and praised for being a forward thinker. Now it seems all I see is high design and personal sites. Standards have been replaced with style.

It’s good. People are actually getting it and it’s not just the standards geeks. We recently had a client who asked specifically for standards (and CSS and XHTML specifically) for their site. That was a first I hope to see become a trend.

Now if only all those developers who are resistant to change would get on board…ah well. In any-case, I’ve not really talked about the work going on at my new job so I thought I’d take a minute and share some of the work we’ve done recently.

The Work

My roles on these projects are varied. I’ve been doing mostly information architecture, project management, content direction and a smattering of development. The credit for the design here needs to go to Geoff Smith (check out Lookatlao.com) and much of the back-endy, dev-stuff was done by Mark Burgess.

With that out of the way, here are a few of the sites we’ve launched in the last few months. With lots more on the way:

Filed under: Web Standards
Keyword Tags: web+standards design work css

Comments

1. Chris K said:

Really nice work. I think the war for standards is slowly being won. Like you, I find it easier to convince clients on the benefits of standards compared to other developers/designers.

I’ve going off a little bit, but it seems like the larger design community leans against standards and more toward Flash because they can control the look much more like print, regardless if its not in the best interests of their clients. I was looing through the latest issue of HOW (August 2005) that includes the interactive design winners. It’s amazing that 16 of the 18 sites featured in the beginning are all Flash, and one site only works with IE for Windows.

Posted on June 17, 2005 09:37 AM | #

2. Justin P. said:

That AAA Washington site looks like it was a lot of work. The site is huge, did you do all that from scratch or just what? I couldn’t imagine doing that site, along with all the other sites you have mentioned all within the last couple months! That must be quite a web firm you have up there.

Posted on June 17, 2005 10:18 AM | #

3. Keith said:

Justin – I think we do have quite a team. That AAA site was a lot of work, and it took a long time. Work had begun on that before I got there, a few months before. It was the first project I did any work on.

It was a least 6 months to get that one up. We just *launched* it recently. ;)

With any large site and organization you’ll have a lot of work ahead of you. With the AAA site we had the common issues of last minute changes, getting to a consensus on the desgin and, as always, getting the content we needed to build out the site.

Posted on June 17, 2005 10:24 AM | #

4. Justin P. said:

I imagine there was *a lot* of backend work to do in order to plugin to their existing nationwide network of members (unless it’s all state-by-state).

I’ve to ask though, why did you choose classic ASP vs. ASP.NET? I put my ASP coding shoes in the closet sometime around 2002 and haven’t touched ‘em since, is that the language of choice for your team or just something you were bound into because of the client?

Posted on June 17, 2005 10:47 AM | #

5. Su said:

(Excuse me while I step around that elephant with “They’re recommendations from a group of people who are not an actual standards body, and which no browser gets quite right, or even gets wrong in quite the right way, seeing as there are entire sections of the specs that are totally open to interpretation” branded into its side.)

Chris:
The category you object to(sorry, but I don’t have the August HOW yet; Their site says the current is June?) is named “Interactive,” correct? Not “XHTML/CSS” or “Valid and Served with Correct MIME Type in UTF-8” or somesuch?
I’m assuming that your indignation over the sites being Flash-based is backed up with research indicating that they could be reproduced using nothing but standards. If so, please show your work. It is, of course, expected that your solutions will work in every browser that the Flash-based versions do.

While I normally wouldn’t suggest such a thing, the problem here is that you seem to presume to know the constraints and requirements of these projects, and so I feel justified in requiring that you replace and not just approximate them.

Posted on June 17, 2005 10:51 AM | #

6. Su said:

To the actual topic at hand, the AAA site does look nice. There are bunches of small design touches hidden here and there that make it come together really well.

There’s also more than the usual typographic(as in actual browser text) detail in these. Good to see.

Posted on June 17, 2005 10:57 AM | #

7. Chris K said:

Su:
I am making a presumption, possibly incorrectly, one one of two possibilities;

1: an extremely small number of submissions were non-Flash sites and led to very few non-Flash sites being awarded.

2: the determination for winning is based primarily on visual eye candy and little else. The project requirements may have required those sites to be made in Flash only, that information is not revealed. It would be nice to see more reasoning behind the design. Unfortunately, I talk to a lot of web designers that use Flash because its neat or they can control a lot of things to the pixel, but don’t seem to put usability at or near the top of the list. I admit my presumptions can be really off on the competition, and the designers I talk to are either a very small minority, or they do consider usability high but aren’t saying so, but on the surface it doesn’t seem to be the case.

Posted on June 17, 2005 11:11 AM | #

8. Ian Cheung said:

Impressive work Keith & team. As for the move towards and beyond standards based design, I think that it starts with designers that get it but it only makes it after clients get it (like the one you mentioned).

The laggard designers will have no choice but to follow suit once the majority of clients are clued in. Well that’s my hope anyway.

Posted on June 17, 2005 11:16 AM | #

9. Chris K said:

I guess my point was that outside of CSS galleries like CSS Vault, CSS Beauty and Stylegala, well-designed sites that are usable and standards-based like the ones Keith did don’t seem to get the recognition they deserve. Flash seems to drive the recognition in the design community. I’m also not saying that awards and recognition should be the motivating factor to doing work. But I think that would help motivate developers and designers to move more in that direction.

Posted on June 17, 2005 11:18 AM | #

10. Keith said:

Justin – ASP was the client’s choice. We prefer (and recommend) PHP.

Ian – Thanks!

Posted on June 17, 2005 11:20 AM | #

11. Jonathan Fenocchi said:

Super, Keith! You guys really did a swell job on those sites. Keep up the good work!

Posted on June 17, 2005 10:31 PM | #

12. Paul Solecki said:

Very nice! The last web company I worked for just didn’t care about standards or accessibility. They said they did but in the end it came down to money and delivering on time.

Keith how do you get around the fact that using the the Request object in ASP can’t deal with & a m p ; (sorry had to space that) in the querystring as opposed to &? I’ve had to write my own QueryString parser?

Posted on June 20, 2005 03:57 AM | #