Stumbling at the last
Posted in Reviews on: Wednesday, December 7, 2005 by Paul Boag
With the launch of the new and somewhat improved Headscape site only days away, I find myself debating whether my approach has been the right one.
The reason I haven’t been posting much over the last couple of weeks is due to the fact that my every waking moment is being spent obsessing over the new Headscape website. I want it to be perfect, I want it to stand out from the crowd, I want it to be beyond criticism. Of course, I can want that until I am blue in the face but it is never going to happen.
No such thing as perfection
There is no such thing as perfection on the web. The problem is that things change so fast that best practice one minute is sadly out of date the next. Take for example the new dynamic resolution approach that everybody is discussing. I so wish that I had used this on the Headscape site, but I didn’t because it wasn’t around at the time.
Not settling for second best
There is a fine line to walk where you accept the site is never going to be perfect but where you don’t settle for second best.
There is a fine line to walk where you accept the site is never going to be perfect but where you don’t settle for second best.
Of course, if you read this blog regularly, you know that I am a great believer in evolving sites rather than redesigning them every few years. But, I cant help wondering if I have paired back my ideas for the Headscape site so far (by saying I will add that later), that the site on launch is going to be a bit of a disappointment.
What have I missed?
My other major concern is that I so desperately want this out of the door, that I might be cutting corners not only with the functionality but also with the quality of the coding & content. Is the site as accessible as it could be? Am I sure it will work in all major browsers? Have I caught all of the typos? What have I missed? What has slipped through the net?
And the morale of the story?
So what conclusions do I draw from my concerns about the Headscape site.
I remain convinced that launching a competent, well tested, well built site is more important than having all the extra bells and whistles in place. I believe that too many web projects fail because they want to deliver the world on day one and so the site never gets finished. However, I also recognise that you only get one chance to impress and so the site has to be good enough to shout about even from the outset.
I also believe that the last few days before launch are critical. Web designers are notoriously bad for picking up details and yet it is exactly that which can undermine an otherwise good site. As they say, the devil is in the detail *gulp*
5 Comments
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Good luck with the new site Paul, I am sure it will turn out to be fantastic :-)
We’re finally re-doing our ugly one over the course of Christmas so I guess I have this all to come!
Thanks Richard,
I cant believe you are redoing your site. I really like it! One question though. You say your existing site is Triple A compliant and yet it is fixed width. How do you reconcile this with guideline 3.4 which requires relative values?
As I said it’s pants. It’s over two years old and out of date and jaded.
The AAA is a bone of contention within the company. Yes we know it falls down on a few of the check points (it’s good for most of them though). After all don’t we all, with criteria like a site must be viewable in whatever language the person browsing the site wants it to be. However, as the sales team point out there are many companies that advertise being AAA without making the slightest effort or knowing what steps should be taken. I guess they would rather tell the li.. sorry do their marketing and rely on us to keep it as small an untruth as possible, to keep up with other companies that market and don’t care how their sites are constructed. Some of the rest of us tend to disagree.
I guess sometimes passion has to fall away a little to meet the needs of business.
Fair enough. I have to appreciate your honesty. I guess your sales team are right, a lot of companies make much worse claims. Personally however I think that this could back to bite you in the arse. Many of our clients are all too aware of the guidelines and dont appreciate being “marketed at”.
So how big is red ant? Looks pretty large judging by your site? What’s your role there?
We’re about 15 strong, so not very large at all. I guess medium sized in terms of web companies, but for average company sizes we’re tiny.
I guess we’re lucky to work with some nice clients which we can tell people about. And personally I wish we could talk about some really nice clients that we can’t tell people about. This makes us seem a little larger than we are.
You’re right about being marketed at and for the new site I will be putting my foot down and we’ll drop all of the badges (we don’t need no stinkin badges ;). Back when they went on there of course WAI was pretty unheard of apart from a few companies in web, and pretty much no company outside of web; so there was a little more reason.
Over here I’m the technical director, which means I don’t normally do that much mark-up, but do a little bit of everything and try to help to keep people on the straight and narrow. For example whilst babysitting the builders in our offices this evening I’ve been performance tuning some stored procedures on the beta of the new cms (5000% improvement and an e-mail to a dev that if he uses UDFs in views again I’ll chop his fingers off ;).
I guess the accessibility and standards thing here is mainly about keeping people on the straight and narrow. When they do it they should be doing it properly. After all the code is easier to maintain, development is quicker in the long term (think bug fixing and changing), and clients get a better job.
For now I believe the sander has finished so at quarter to 10 I am off to get a well deserved pint!
Keep up the good work Paul and look forward to seeing the new Headscape site :-)