Web site redesign rules

I saw this just now on DiveIntoMark …. It announces a full redesign of the Wired News site. The folks at Wired have moved to full CSS and XHTML. We’ve been going through the design changes needed for ukonline.gov.uk to support this change – for us, it needs some upgrades to the architecture and, of course, some significant re-coding. At the same time, we wanted to open up our platform so that the rest of government could manage their websites through the uko environment too. If you are in the UK public sector, you might have heard this project referred to as “DotP”. We will launch on Feb 28th next year. Importantly, this change will remove the distinction between our standard site and the “easy access” version – the style sheets will change according to the device being used to read the site, whether it’s a screen reader, a PDA or whatever. That’s the theory anyway – I am hoping that all the devices out there are smart enough to do this. The other benefit is that page size shrinks pretty dramatically, maybe a 1/4 of the size or less. Less code means faster download and faster access to the information needed. Now that I see Wired doing it, I know that we have to hurry up and get there.

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