Now, don’t get me wrong: I love corporate work. It is challenging, reliable, profitable and it’s nice dealing with companies who have things like, you know, accounting departments. However, every once it a while, it’s nice to work on a project that’s a little more fun.
The BellRays website was just that kind of project. For those of you unfamiliar with The BellRays, they are a world-famous punk/blues band headed up by the very cool Bob and Lisa Vennum. They needed a website that would make it easy to keep up with their fans, so in between European tours over the last few months, we’ve had the pleasure of working with Bob and Lisa on this cool new content managed website and web store.
Among other things, the new site gives them the ability to keep their gig calendar up to date, sell swag, offer a few mp3s for download, showcase their lyrics, and in general offer a lot of information about their long history and prolific catalog.
5 comments so far.
Do you also offer valid XHTML as an option? I am looking to have a website developed, but none of the sites in your portfolio, or this website itself are actually valid according to http://validator.w3.org.
Do you produce valid pages if the customer requests it?
Hello mystery poster,
To answer your question, yes we can, although I personally am internally conflicted about the concept of web standards. There was actually a great article on A List Apart a couple years back that perfectly illustrates the issue. I tend to lean toward Doug Bowman’s opinion on the issue. Here’s the article: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whereourstandardswentwrong
I think I tend to approach validation on most projects a little more pragmatically, thinking of it as an ideal goal as opposed to a strict requirement. Weighing that goal against commercial considerations is a realistic concern. I generally tend to develop with a sort of “occasionally invalid, but within my control” approach. Also, often on fast builds or lower-cost projects, we will sometimes use open-source solutions that themselves don’t validate, which is another concern.
That said, the next iteration of the F/W site and blog (which is in progress right now) will validate, but really only for my own personal satisfaction. We have never had a customer ask for a site that validates, but we are fully capable of meeting such a request.
Thank you very much for your response, I was concerned that I may have sounded a little terse, and I assure you this was unintentional.
My question was mainly due to the fact that all of our internal sites developed within the last 18 months have been created with valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional or Strict markup as a prerequisite, and the management have decided that the redesign of our outward facing site (slated to commence once design ideas are finalised in the next month or so) should follow the same specification.
Since the project will be larger than in-house resources allow, we’ve decided to outsource it to an external agency, and I must admit, it has been harder than I expected to find a design agency willing to entertain the idea of a site created with valid markup as a requirement (we have never previously used external agencies, and so finding good quality contacts in the industry has been a high priority).
I have mostly run into responses along the lines of “valid markup is not in and of itself a guarantee of quality, and as such, our output will validate for the most part, with some exceptions” (this being a quote, verbatim, from an agency I emailed two weeks ago, with no indication that our requirements would change their stance on the issue). As a designer myself, I fully understand this view for practicality reasons, but as a customer, I am slightly wary when it is seemingly dismissed out of hand even though it can be a completely legitimate requirement (arguments of merit aside) for certain customers.
I’m sorry to have used such an anonymous method of contact, but I have found recently that some agencies take a particularly (shall we say) “pro-active” approach to retaining potential customers, and given an email address or phone number, will attempt to get in touch on a rather too-regular basis.
Once again, many thanks for your response, and we will be in touch via your contact email address once our requirements have been finalised.
No problem. Hope to hear from you soon!
So true, it feels great when we do something different or something unusual once in a while. It can bring out the best in us and can somehow help us to unwind.