Code
Pleading the Web Standards Case
Sunday, 18 September 2005
This past week i've found myself explaining what I know of web standards and why it's important for big companies. More so than the average web designer especially. The company I work for seems to be stuck somewhere between the stone age of web design and today.
They started out at a time when FrontPage was people's friends. Even back then I liked Adobe GoLive better. Their new clients get the fancy Dreamweaver which is great. I love Dreamweaver... but the thought of retro-fitting over 500 sites doesn't sound appealing to me. Their bank sites in the rawest form for extra small banks in mostly rural communities. A lot of people on dial-up who probably dont surf the web all day. I tried to show them the bandwidth savings they would get by switching to a CSS-P layouts with XHTML and valid markup. I redesigned our own homepage using it. It only took me 2 days. Here are the differences it made on just this one homepage.
Before Vs. After |
||
|---|---|---|
| Before |
After |
|
| Tables Used: | 5 | 0 |
| Images: | 71 |
10 |
| Spacers: | 32 |
0 |
| File Size: | 46k |
6 |
Files reduced by 87% Do all the math for 500 sites if only visited once per day with say only 10 pages, you use 80 Terabytes a year. The new file with those same stats would only produce 10 Terabytes per year. Pretty good savings. Maybe they could pass that down to me. I'll keep my day job. I just put a little presentation together for them so we'll so what they have to say. So far, i've found using CSS-P is really not all that hard and once you get the hang of it, it's a lot easier. The thought of having to go back into Fireworks and reslice if they want new navigation. God forbig they add navigation because you might have to rework the entire page. I don't really want to do that because they changed their mind about navigation. I'll just keep tucked away in my corner waiting for the big dogs to see the light at the other end of the tunnell hoping its not a train.
Feed Station |
Bits of WorkGrace Digital Audio I built out this sexy new product layout for them which uses quite a bit of jQuery for some great effects. |