Tag Archives: Web Standards

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“Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing”

So far, this web design thing seems to require great effort to produce “stuff that works,” yet in the end just looks like all the rest.

How many sites have I seen with the same fixed, under-800-ish pixel wide, centered layout with a single masthead image, a horizontal navigation bar, then a two or three column layout with some blog entries, some links, and some pictures? Oh, and a footer.

They all validate, they’ll mostly show up on a monitor without a horizontal scroll bar, and the layout won’t break on a big monitor, but I look at a site that took multiple hours of work and think, “That’s it?”

The learning curve has been surprisingly steep, at least if you want to know how to actually work up a page yourself (rather than using someone else’s template or CMS theme).

fn1. A note about the title of this entry: it’s Shakespeare, from “Macbeth — Act 5, Scene 5”:http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/macbeth/macbeth.5.5.html. Grand and auspicious, I know, but I enjoyed the sound of it.

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History of Web Design, Accelerated

With a grand total of experience building _four_ websites so far, I feel as though I’ve traversed a decade of web design history.

The first two are similar: “montgomeryintl.com”:http://montgomeryintl.com *Good:* lots of whitespace, cute rollovers, some decent photographs. *Bad:* layout tables, rollover e-mail links are graphics and not text. Likewise, “montgomeryimages.com”:http://montgomeryimages.com *Good:* same, with a javascript slide show that I like so far. *Bad:* same, and rollover nav links are again graphics and not text.

Third, “inthewoodsstore.com”:http://inthewoodsstore.com *Good:* the information architecture is acceptable, all the right information in the right places, file sizes and load speeds sufficiently small and fast. *Not so good:* the scope of the project didn’t fit having a shopping cart. *Bad:* Okay, I admit it — I tried What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG). And no, it didn’t end up saving any time, produced unwieldy code, and the layout breaks if you resize the text.

Fourth, “Ellen Carroll Designs”:http://ellencarrolldesigns.com At this point, I “discovered” web standards. Yes, I know they’ve been around for a long time. Not that I’m an expert, but I don’t understand why anyone would build a site any other way. *Good:* XHTML and CSS. It validates too, except for the script for site logging that Yahoo webhosting inexplicably adds _after_ the tag. Much better. *Not so good:* except for one table on a form page (I had to get the site _finished_, ‘ya know?)

Progress. Growth. Learning. Good stuff.

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