Web Professionalism

[Padwah]

I've got no idea if it's too abstract or not. I guess we'll find out in a few posts time. I thought it was bloody brilliant though.

Indeed, its a very good explanation. Also while content may, potentially, be king if it's poorly presented then no one will ever read it.

With regards to the BBC website it is all being slowly converted to an XHTML/CSS based design but with such a massive amount of content it's not exactly going that quickly. And, as has already been mentioned, you only have to disable CSS on the BBC site to see how much that they are using it already.

Whilst using tables to layout your code is technically wrong if it's done well it doesn't really cause any problems. Though as more and more people are accessing the web through mobile phones, PDA's and gadgets like the PSP creating flexible designs is becoming more important. And, whilst you can use CSS to make your table layouts more flexible using CSS will save your space and your users time in downloading your pages.

Anyway, I know wat I'm sticking with

 

[Gef]

I know my explanation above is a little too abstract perhaps but it's how I see things anyway, not just with website development but with everything that involved being paid to do a job.

I dont see how you can say a site built with tables is going to eventually 'fall appart' because it wont. Its actually more likely that when the next gen of browsers come out it will be all the CSS built sites that will need to be revisited. Because all the ugly CSS hacks that we constantly need to use to make things work right will become redundant, change or behave differently.

Leave the standards preachers to their ways, ultimately they are in the right, and in the months/years to come things will move over. But hey, whats the big rush?

We have been bitten before by trying to jump the gun, we started developing a site in .NET (Beta 1) with the plan that by the time we had it finished, the release candidate would be out and we would be really ahead of the game. Unfortunately they changed so much by the final release that we had to redevelop huge chunks of it to make it work properly.

For now, i'm quite content building hybrid sites, its all I can do really with our CMS system. My latest if people want to tear it appart ..

http://hoe.icostaging.co.uk/

PS: Its not quite finished yet, so dont be too harsh

 

[KevinUK]

Oooh thats nice.
How long does a site like that take to make? How many people in the team? etc

 

[Maljonic]

I dont see how you can say a site built with tables is going to eventually 'fall appart' because it wont.

Good, I'm glad we agree because I didn't say that at all. I was talking about being professional and not taking shortcuts mostly, which I guess can mean using tables sometimes and I did use some code with a table as an example, but I also started out by saying "It's not just about tables".

P.S. the site looks quite nice, there's a bit of apostrophe abuse with the 'Top 10's of the Heart', but I guess that's nothing to do with you.

 

[Gef]

Oooh thats nice.
How long does a site like that take to make? How many people in the team? etc

Cheers

Two people, took us about 10-12 days in total, obviously all the content has been added by the client (and still needs to be looked at!) the main part was the flash map and intergrating it with the england.net database. You have no idea how painstaking it is to trace out all the A-roads in the midlands by hand using Illustrator, took hours!

The code situation is far from ideal, but its all semi-accessable, the bulk of it is layed out using CSS, we had to take a few shortcuts with the content pages as we were running out of time. But its good enough for their needs. All fully integrated into a content manager so hopefully once its done we wont need to touch it for a long while.

Mal, I know its not just about tables, but saying that sites built in the old fashioned way are a 'bodge job' is a little harsh. If it works in the major browsers and accessibility isnt really an issue then why not build it in tables? They are reliable, quick and easy. Classic example of what I do day in day out; boss has a product we dont really have a site for, so I get an email at 9.10 on a monday morning, "Need a site asap for this product, dont make it fancy just simple and quick, you have 2 days"

Should I break my balls trying to get it all symanticly marked up and totally accessable? If I had of i'd have been there till midnight on the tuesday and it would have still looked a mess. As it was I spent a day doing the design, and cut corners all over the place to get the content manager and code together. Anyway, heres the result http://www.creativemessage.co.uk/ .. which the boss was overjoyed with.

 

[Gef]

However, then what happens when you want to change the layout? You have to rewrite the entire site.

Thats not always true, we use XSL templates, generally there is one master template that holds the main 'framework' of the site. Its incredibly easy to add another master template thats designed specifically to work on a mobile/pda, or whatever device you like. We sometimes use them to switch to a 'text only' or 'print version' of the site .. but again, if its requested and paid for

 

[Shovel]

The NFB vs. Target.com. This could be at least interesting, or if the effort is sucessful, absolutely huge.

 

[Maljonic]

See if I got contacted by the NFB or its British counterpart and was asked to make my site more accessible I would have at least made an effort to acknowledge the request and done something. You're right though, it could be huge. Other big corporations will have to take notice of the issue if this goes through, or even if it gets enough publicity.