One of the biggest motivation behind this new site design is to make our website more compliant to web standards. And among them, making the site XHTML and CSS compliant are at the top of the list.
Going the CSS way proves to bring along a pack of benefits. First of all, the separation of content and presentation styles meant that we are no longer burdened with nasty “hack-together” codes. All the content and structure get marked up in XHTML while the visual styles and font formatting are left in separate CSS files. On the one hand, this translates to much better way to maintain the website, on the other hand, we open up possibilities to serve up the exact same content and structure in different formats.
A good example would be to view a print preview of our pages. We have not gotten around to working much on those stylesheets, but from the print preview, you will see that certain content (like the navigation menus) of the original page get stripped away from the print version, and the graphical headings get rendered in text form instead. What we have here, at not much extra costs, is a “printer-friendly” website. Gone are the days when we need to have a “printer-friendly” link to dynamically generate pages that were fit for printing. Beyond printing, we can also have stylesheets for mobile devices, so visitors using their smartphones or PDAs will still be able to view the pages, without having to download the big fat graphics that are really targetted at desktop users.
One really big thing we also love about our new CSS site is how it is well supported over a wide range of modern browsers. By making our website (and our clients’ websites) as compliant to today’s web standards as much as we possibly can, we are on our way to make the user experience of our (and our clients’) visitors better.
This is Part 1 of a series of posts relating to the ideas behind our new website look. We hope to share with you our experiences in working through our latest revamp. In the next part, I will be talking about the use of Ajax in our Portfolio section. Stay tuned.
