Christmas Clean Out
Every year we look forward to the holidays and the time home or abroad with our families overindulging and enjoying the festive season.
Before the break, we have the mad rush of finishing off the final projects of the year. We take this time to dust off the cobwebs and clear out the cupboards of our own website. It usually takes a vivid debate over our priorities, our markets, site architecture, and design principles. After much gnashing of teeth, validation submissions, stylesheet reformatting and overall optimising, this year is no different from any other of the last nine.
Our focus this year is based on the practice of what we preach to our clients on a daily basis; clean, usable navigation and well defined areas of the site that don't confuse but at the same time deliver a clear message. We have separated content from design with valid stylesheets and xhtml pages. This year's doctype is strict, ensuring that browsers use their strictest, most standards compliant rendering modes. This we feel is important for the quality of the future web, and will make our transition to iphones and other formats easier.
Accessibility is always a concern, and we have worked hard to deliver content that is accessible to the widest audience possible. Although the 'thou-shalt-not-javascript' idea is losing alot of ground in web standards circles, we have made it so that if you happen to be a user with limited browsing capabilities, you wont miss any of the action.
If you happen to be a keen gardener, you'll know your work is never done, which is how we feel about our own site. We hope to add a few more options over the coming months as we work through the different technologies. Our client section should be up soon, and look for a phone-viewable design in the near future, to name a couple. We are also greatly anticipating the release of Expression Engine 2.0, our favorite CMS, and the benefits that will bring to us and our customers.
Overall, it has been a good year. We thank all of our clients for their custom and loyalty over the past 12 months, and we are looking forward to the challenges ahead in 2009.
