The Innocent Statement

This is an ‘Ask the Audience' entry so you can all join in with a bit of feedback! If you cant be bothered to read it all, just go straight to the last sub heading.

Chatting to Duncan last week, in the Jacuzzi, about my next big project; Netring.co.uk ! We have wanted to do this since I started back in July, but other projects always need our attention. Things are a little quieter now (for how long we don't know), so we want to start looking in the mirror for a bit.

Edit: Since my first write of this, things have already gotten a bit busier, but we are still hoping to get this done within a reasonably amount of time.

This is how we expect the 'web standards tab' to look. Can anyone tell me to whome this link would be going?

Getting going

Hopefully a lot of readers will agree with me that the hardest projects to get going are the in-house projects, especially when you are in this line of work. ‘The shoe maker wears the worst shoes' as the saying goes!

Well, with time we have actually got started. I started on the design a good few weeks ago, and with tips from other designers made quite a few adjustments to my work. Then last week I started playing with it again, and few more light touched to the design and I have now started porting that into a HTML that will be used later on as the template. We will possibly be using ASP.net as a back end to the site for some of the more dynamic elements of what we want.

Not to much of that for now, but onto the reason why this entry is an ‘Ask The Audience' entry….

Supporting the Standards

One of the main reasons for the new site is obviously to bring it up to a more professional, and modern standard. The company is now trying its best to be meeting those standards in all its work, and the main let down is our website (Again with the Shoe Maker reference). Please don't look at our current portfolio. It is harsh to say the least!

One of the things that is included in ‘Supporting the Standards' though, is doing more than just using them. Trying to promote other people to use them, and to increase awareness amongst other organisations and companies as to what these strange ‘Web Standards' really are.

Completely by accident, we think we have found a neat little way to help towards this effect; by linking to all our favourite web standards advocate websites. This may or may not seem like a radical idea. If it does, then you may need to rethink your idea of radical ideas. However, we don't just plan on having a web standards page, with a bunch of links, no, we want to make is more interesting.

The Red Button Effect: “What does that do?”

You see, in our new navigation, we have some space; room for a small tab at the end of all our larger tabs. So what we plan on doing is including a link on every page that this navigation appears, to a web standard advocate site. It will be a random selection from an XML document containing all the web sites that we want to include; sites such as The Web Standards Project, or the Web Standards Awards. We are hoping that it will have what I call ‘The Red Button Effect'. When someone sees the big red button that is a little different to the rest of the page, what do they do?

What I want to ask you people is, who do you think should be included on such a list of web standards advocates sites?