Web designers, are we there yet?

September 02, 2004

Lessons learned from the 2004 Website Olympics left me with some encouraging results about standards and web design. I wanted to feature the Olympic websites because they would show us a fresh look at what and how web designers are developing large scale websites today. From my tests there were those that failed(Fox Sports), those are making strides in the right direction (NBC), and those that continue to succeed (ESPN, ATHENS 2004). So, I ask myself, “Are we at a point were we can say CSS and XHTML based designs are mainstream?” I think we are close. Here is why I say so.

The Pioneers

First we need to know where we were. Rewind one year to two years ago. Large CSS based websites were few and the word was just getting out on the CSS, standards, XHTML, and accessibility. Much credit goes to Douglas Bowman and his groundbreaking wired.com design, Mike Davidson for his ESPN design which forced visitors to updgrade from older browsers, and many others I could name that helped push standards and CSS web design.

The Innovation Machine

The aforementioned stimulated the innovation and promotion standards based web design to what has become the flagship of web design today. Economists describe two ways to innovation: technology push and market pull. Technology push is a technology that is created and people have to be convinced they want it. Market pull is where a market exists for a solution to a problem, and it effectively pulls the technology out of the lab and into the real world. While standards based design has mainly been a technology push innovation it has now turned the corner to a market pull innovation. More and more web developing products (viz. Dreamweaver, Contribute 3, Movable Type.) are supporting web standards. We now see the industry leaders (Microsoft, Macromedia, AOL, Redhat ) and other large companies ( ESPN, Chevrolet, PGA, MP3.com, Sprint) move towards a more semantic and standards based design. Moreover, designers are paying more attention to accessibility and usability, which go hand in hand with standards based design. The mainstream of web design is now catching that fire. Although some of web sites (olympic website and Microsoft) are hybrids, tables and CSS, they are certainly making strides in that right direction.

The day after tomorrow

Innovation is bubbling in the web design labs out there. For example, sIFR technique, using your style sheets wisely, and designing for a new medium, handhelds. What’s after that may be up to you.