Web Standards — Aren’t they a given now?
It is hockey season now and so I’ve been paying attention to the local team and all things surrounding it. So today I noticed that Mike Modano has relaunched his site. Well, Mike has been one of my favorite players for more than a decade and since I make my living in technology its of interest to see what the site looks like.
So when you go to www.mikemodano.com, you see a nice enough site, but I am not impressed with animated GIFs or Flash animation. These days I quickly resort to viewing the source to see just how astute the designer or design agency is. So in this case, what do I find? Obtrusive javascript and a tables-based design. Yikes! Maybe I, myself, need a reality check, but I thought we were past this kind of implementation approach. Its just too easy to build it the right way with web standards these days.
So I had to go explore which firm put this site together. Clicking the link at the bottom of the page takes me to Nform Interative which contains an all Flash home page with a logo that is clipped in Firefox and a page entitled “temp_home_page”. What’s more, there’s no pages to describe the agency. Needless to say, its completely SEO-unfriendly. Wow! And they got the Mike Modano gig?!
This is all relevant to me because I am embarking on a freelance career where I do contract programming and website development. I do all this with the latest trends in technology and web standards. So, test-driven development, CSS-based designs and lean standards-compliant markup are staples of anything I would do. But it highlights to me that we still have a long way to go because people are still building old school sites and clients are still paying for them.
Hopefully, I can articulate why my approach is better and start winning some of these clients. Doing so will offer them bigger bang for the buck and position them better for the future. Its too late for Mike’s site, though.