Marktopia

I recently read Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke and found much of it compelling.  There were a number of ideas in the book that made me think about the way I design and how I could improve upon my designs.  Two things in general stuck out and after a couple of weeks, I have come to really like one of the ideas and dislike the other.  I will tackle the one I don’t like first.

Always Using Semantic Code

Semantic code is great.  For those of you not in the web business, it means not making up your own stuff for HTML that exists, i.e., don’t make a class called “heading”, using one of the HTML heading tags.  The book encourages the use of semantic code throughout your site.  If you have a grouping of pictures on a page, instead of putting them in a general container, but them in a list with each picture being a list item.  Then identify the list and each item on the list and use those IDs to style it in CSS.  With this method, the world of absolute positioning can open up to you and you can do some really inventive and cool designs, outside of the normal box model.

All of this is well and good if you are the one maintaining the site.  This starts to fall apart though when you have end users updating their site and have no knowledge or care of semantic code.  Tools like Contribute, Dreamweaver, etc, allow users to make new paragraphs, insert images, and make new lists.  This is all good and required, however it might not be what the designer intended.  With the power of absolute positioning comes the responsibility of making semantic HTML, and once something unintended is introduced, things can go haywire pretty darn quick with a design.  Because of this, a balance has to be struck between perfectly semantic code and something the end user can update easily.  If you are doing your own site, then I recommend going crazy with semantics, otherwise, just be reasonable.

Don’t Design For the Bare Minimum

When I started as a web designer with CSS, it was always my goal to make the site look the same in all browsers.  This sometimes meant some hacks to get some of the “not quite” supported features of CSS to work on all browsers at the time.  As time has progressed, different browsers still have differing levels of support for CSS.  Combining that with the evolution of CSS and you could make a huge chart of CSS selectors and the browsers they work in, and in fact some people have!  By designing for the lowest common denominator, a designer was restricted from the CSS available AND still had to deal with the nuances of each browser.

Clarke proposes different versions of a site for different browsers.  If a browser is supporting cool and new technologies, then why shouldn’t we take advantage of them.  This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take other browsers into account, you still have to make your site look nice in Internet Explorer, but there is nothing to say that you can’t make your site look nicer in Firefox or Safari.  Yes this takes some extra planning, but as a designer you can play with new technology and encourage other people to use browsers so they can see the stuff that is possible with web standards.  On a side note to this, if you want to see what is possible with CSS3, check out an examples page in the latest update for Safari.

Overall, the book was fantastic.  It made me think about the way I am doing design and while I didn’t take everything from it, it was still worth checking out.  I know the next design for my blog will incorporate some of the new web standards and will also use a lot of semantic code, I just don’t think I can do the same with the HTML on a customer’s design.

As I mentioned in my 500th post, I am working on a new design.  Before going too far though, I wanted to get some thoughts from the people that read the site.  Right now I have a single post at a time on the site with links to the last 5 further down.  Do people prefer having more posts on the front of the site, is one good or do you read the site through RSS so it doesn’t matter?  What about colors?  I have a fondness for more natural blues, browns, greens, etc but would a cleaner (read: less color) design work better?  Also, because the single post is at the top of the page, do the things like tags and other content get lost or forgotten for you?  I am looking for constructive critism so feel free to post any and all suggestions.  I realize this is my site, but I also want it to work for you, the reader.

We have a milestone, this is the 500th post for My Tungsten Marktopia.  I have spent the last couple of days trying to think of something meaningful or clever to write for it.  I realized that those things didn’t happen for about 75% of the previous 499 posts, so why start now.

I will reflect that this blog has gone through many changes technology and design-wise.  It started as a Blogger site, then to Movable Type and finally to Wordpress.  Blogger lasted about 6 months, Movable Type about 6 as well, and Wordpress has been going strong for about 4 years now.  There was an experiment with Drupal for about 3 months in there, however it was not able to import from Wordpress and I could not export from it either, so those have been washed from memory.

I don’t have an exact list of the number of designs the site has gone through, but I would estimate around 30 or so.  I like making designs and with some books I have read recently, a new one is in the works again.  Every time I make a design, about 3/4 of the way through I start to get new ideas that I cannot implement, but I will say it again, I hope the new design will stick around for awhile.

So almost 5 years after I started, we are at 500.  I hope it doesn’t take another 5 to get to 1000, but who knows.  For all of you that read this, thanks for your support!

Being a primary member of The Content Webring, I take some ounce of pride in announcing a new content module for my site.  Looking at the Non-Blog Content of the site, you will now see An American’s Guide to Soccer listed.  If you are someone who wants to know more about soccer, as new or longtime fan or just someone who wants to know what the hubbub is all about, I hope you will find this a useful resource.

Right now the introduction is complete, but I plan on rolling out the rest of the sections over the course of the next week.  I do not plan on posting here about when each section is complete, but I will post to my Twitter account, so you can follow that if you want to know when each section is posted.

I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.  Not too much new stuff for the viewers of this site, but lots of neat stuff on the admin panel.  My hopes are now that the work on the admin panel is done, Wordpress will turn to the reader’s experience next.  To celebrate the new version, I also came up with a new design for the site.  There is still a little CSS tinkering to be done, but in general it is ready to go.  Take it for a spin and let me know what you think.