Thank You, A List Apart
My feelings that Web sites should be designed after (and around) the content and not before the content have finally been validated and put into words more graceful than any I could have produced in a recent article on A List Apart entitled, “Reviving Anorexic Web Writing.”
I’ve noticed this throughout my career (albeit pretty short, so far) in Web design that when a person thinks of getting a Web site built for his or herself or company, the first concern that comes to mind is “I want it to look good.” Content usually comes in at a distant second, or even third (because, they want high search engine rankings, too!). And no one wants to write her or his own content either. So if I guess if I could be a Web designer, developer and writer, I’d be off to a great start!
One critique I have of the article, is the author’s assertion that footers “…usually contain a handful of throw-away links, maybe a copyright statement, and contact information. Nobody reads them, because they’re not worth reading.” Obviously the author doesn’t concern herself with SEO or accessibility very much, because those “throw-away links” have a great deal of usefulness to ensure that a site is navigable for both users and search engine bots alike. I also often look at a Web site’s footer to see who (if it’s even listed) built the site.
However, at the risk of sounding like a flip-flopper, I do agree that more could be done with the footer. The visitors who actually read a Web site’s content are a Web site’s best friend and therefore should be catered to (in terms of design and content) in hopes of creating more friends of the like.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:43 am
One thing I have noticed about most of the sites on your profile and this is the thing that really s**ts me about most web developers living in countries where peopel are spoilt with internet speeds that are phenominal is that you constantly persist on not using and implementing sites with frames. It is as if you feel or believe it has no benefit, or has browser compatibility problems, or will slow down the users web viewing experience, I do not live in a country where internet speeds are slow, but they do get capped, and they are costly for speeds that still are primitive compared to the rest of the world. When you do get capped an experience that it is frustrating and angering and you truly feel sorry for those people and countries out there who are still using dial up speeds, which is what i had to use at my friends house until I could pay the internet bill ang get my adsl back up and running. From what i know and from the sites I have developed and different browsers I have tested them on, there seems to be no problems or complications using frames so why not use it, saves loading time (especially when you are displaying a large list of some sort), makes a faster web site for those who are capped or have to use dial up and it will put less strain and memory usage on the machine.
June 11th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Frames are a very old and very bad way to build a Web site.
Use CSS and PHP (or ColdFusion, ASP, Perl, Ruby On Rails, etc.) instead. You’ll get cleaner code, faster loading pages and you won’t confuse the hell out of search engines.