danw
April 29, 2005

I've been rifling through the 'Ministry of Links' and have had a look and some good NZ sites and portfolios.

Lots of excellent design.
Lots of very cool Flash.

This is all good, but do many people here consider designing for web standards, accessibility, and usuablity?

I mean, good design and web standards are not mutually exclusive.

What do you all think?

Zef
May 2, 2005

For more on designing for web standards I recommend you visit http://www.webstandardsawards.com and my article on e-Govt website design

James McG
May 24, 2005

I remember that there was a thread on this topic some time ago, so the lack of posts may be more to do with exhaustion of the topic, rather than general indifference. It was one of my first discussions on this forum, in fact - mainly because, more than wanting to push any personal agenda, I was curious to see to what extent others were applying standards.

In my own business, all of our work is standards-based. One visitor to our site became confused, because some of our work was not standards compliant. They then gave me some stick for even mentioning standards. But the issue is more complex to me than to use them or not. Often, the brief we're given as designers will look for an answer beyond what is acceptable (in terms of standards), but which is still the most appropriate answer. There is a grey area in this issue where a certain amount of common sense needs to be applied.

Redesignboy makes a good point in saying that peer pressure will go a long way to shifting our industry into more sensible practices, but in the end I believe it is the market that decides, and therefore the market that needs education. To use a software analogy (because what are websites other than software?) Microsoft provides a good example of the way that standards, and superior technical performance, are not always indicators for widespread success. The market was swayed by non-technical reasons to buy into one product to such a degree that it became the proxy standard, to the detriment of quality and competition.

Anyway, there's a lot of literature on this topic, particularly online. For CSS inspiration, I enjoy www.csszengarden.com (for which there is an excelllent companion book.) Hand-code! Don't let a machine do your thinking for you (except for the donkey-work ;-) Writing XHTML and CSS is a creative art more powerful than Macromedia/Adobe will ever let you believe!