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What makes a good designer

December 8, 2005 By barrie@compassdesigns.net Leave a Comment

Recently the Disney Store in the UK (disneystore-shopping.disney.co.uk
) redesigned their site with a “reputable” big design firm. The result
was a huge backlash from the design professional community. The new
site was using design practices that were 5 years old and made a highly
inefficient site. Before they changed it, Disney was showing up in
Google selling “spacer gifs” which are extra layout images, an
out-dated way of designing out a site.

DisneySpacerGif The result was an open letter to Disney which had huge support.

Needless to say, Disney changed the site.
Fortunately, there is a rough test that takes 5 seconds to do. There
exists a set of “standards” for web design. Think of them as building
codes for web sites. The director of the organization that creates them
is Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. You can visit
their site (http://validator.w3.org)
and type in a site to see how well it meets these standards. A quick
test is to type in a design firmÂ’s web site to see if it meets
standards. If you have time you can even test a few from their
portfolio. Now, you donÂ’t have to follow building codes when you build
a house, but wouldn’t you rather hire a contractor that did?”

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The Skinny

I am an entrepreneur, web consultant, author and educator.

I have been involved in starting a K-12 School District, a Private High School, and three web tech companies. I also wrote one of the original and best selling books on Joomla.

And I like sailing with kids.

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