I mentioned that the iVillage entertainment section soft-launched a couple of weeks ago, well now the full site is up and kicking (complete with horrid full screen ads to skip before viewing the front page).
It was a very… ehm… colorful project to work on :). As mentioned in my other post, the site is XHTML 1.0 transitional with CSS used for layout, with a little Flash content peppered in there for some extra flavor. More and more of the sites we are working on these days entail an XHTML/CSS layout and then a few Flash movies embedded around in various locations to spice things up a bit, and I have to say it’s working out great. I really think a lot more designers will go in the direction of hybrid sites rather than the old full Flash site or straight HTML in the coming year.
Another thing to note is the validation problem. It seems that most of the problems (if not all) stem from a few sloppy Javascript embeds and unencoded ampersands that were added in by the iVillage development team. Unfortunately with the way the site was developed – doing the design and template coding first, then integrating those files with the content management system – and without someone on the development side constantly cracking the validation whip, I suppose these things are bound to happen.
Anyway, enjoy the site: www.ivillage.com.
I hope more people do things properly, and I’m thrilled the Block became such an adept advocate for standards compliance and the proper use of Flash. Unfortunately, many founders/creative directors/designers of many “hot” design shops are too dumb to see that the Web is a proper medium with rules and constraints and they consider standards to be a boring constraint that goes against their vision and art.
Give it a few years and clients will be demanding adherence to standards and accessibility coupled with great design, and there will be but a few shops with the experience with both to take in all that business.
It is a shame that so many bloatware CMS systems and ad servers pollute otherwise excellent markup. I’m working on a fix for the first part :)