Well… make time!
Web standards require much thought and preparation. However, in this busy world we live in nobody makes time for anything, just as long as it works. I believe that it does take an amount of thought and preparation, but what doesn’t if you want it done right; or is the goal to short change clients and ourselves just to get bye.
In the movie Road Trip, the character Rubin said, It’s supposed to be a challenge, it’s a shortcut! If it were easy it would just be the way. Well when it comes to slicing a design for the web, the shortcuts are easy and the way is the challenge.
When I first started working on the web, in 1996, all I knew was tables for layout and I thought that was the way things were done. Yet in the back of my mind I always said to myself there has to be a better way. Unfortunately I did not look for it, but in 2005, it found me. My co-worker James Boykin told me about something called CSS. He directed me to The Beauty in CSS Design which was the first resource that I used to begin learning about CSS and it uses.
The first site I sliced, using CSS, was my church site. I remember saying this is cool. Then I got hired by a wonderful web soultions company in Alexandria, VA. Where I am currently employed. I was so far behind the curve my challenge was to grasp CSS and keep projects on schedule. Well thanks to the help of the other webmasters there my knowledge of not only CSS, but web standards has grown exponentially. My knowledge continues to grow with sharing ideas with my fellow webmasters and reading such sites and blogs as:
- Don’t Meet Your Hero’s
- A List Apart
- The Web Standards Project
- Vitamin
- SimpleBits
- Veerle’S blog
- CSS Beauty
- Cameron Moll
- Andy Clarke
- Molly
- Jeffrey Zeldman
- Jason Santa Maria
- Andy Budd
- and many more…
Andy Budd’s book CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions really helped me understand CSS. If your interested in producing sites using CSS I definitely recommend reading that book. I also recommend regularly checking out the sites above and doing some exploration of your own for good CSS resources.
See there is no reason with all the resources I have listed that we can not adhere to webstandards. There’s even a checklist to help you out.
April 16th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
I agree there Mr. Turner. Once people understand the benefits of web standards, I don’t see how they cannot see that it is worth it to put in the extra time. Also, once you begin putting in that extra time, it will start becoming less and less as you become better.