Fixpert

Hello again. If you missed Part 1 in this series go check it out, or if you’re utterly confused go read the introductory post about the Crutchfield redesign. Everyone ready to continue on? Great! Now it’s time to talk about what I have heard Jeffrey Zeldman refer to as “classitis”. I think the Crutchfield site may have been suffering from a more serious form of this virus, maybe “acute respitory inflammatory bowel classitis.” Or, being in an industry that is fond of it’s acronyms, ARIBC. It was bad, and no amount of antibiotics would help.

Crutchfield’s use of stylesheets was interesting, rather than any contextual selectors, there were an abundance of classes that had nothing to do with describing the content that they affected. If their names were not entirely arbitrary, like classes Panel1 through Panel8, they were named for the visual effect that they produced, such as RedText. Does something need to be red on the site? Just wrap a <span class="RedText"></span> around it and you’re done. Incidentally, we had the funny side effect on a skinned partner site that we maintain, the RedText style was rendered as grey on that site to match its branding.

TextTiny

On the off chance that a style was aptly named for it’s original use, such as Caption, it wasn’t long before Caption was used anywhere that text needed to be 11px tall and bold. The most common class that you would see in our html was TextTiny. It was all over the place. It was originally a percentage based size, so it was common to see two nested TextTiny's to create small text. Like so: <span class="TextTiny"><span class="TextTiny">this text sure is tiny!</span></span>. One of the first things that I did when I started digging into the 1000+ lines of code in the Crutchfield CSS file was to declare a default style for the body that would be equivalent to the effect that TextTiny produced. Then I alerted the IT and Web Design teams that they could begin stripping out any instances of TextTiny that they saw in any of their code. This alone accounted for a huge bandwidth savings.

Tables for Non-Tabular Data Contributes to Classitis

Here’s an interesting tidbit for you to chew on: the more you use ugly nested tables for the visual presentation of your site, the less effective your style declarations become. One of the reasons we had so many instances of TextTiny around was because it had to be re-declared for each new table cell that was opened. The table cells did not receive the styling from the previous TextTiny declaration, so it was declared again (and again, and again).

Lesson Learned: Contextual Selectors

Contextual selectors are totally dudical, and the sooner you learn that the better. It will make your life so much easier, your code so much leaner, and the spirit and harmony of the universe will prevail on a magical unicorn of love.

Check it out, A List Apart has been quiet for a while, now we know why.

Ok, I’m like so five minutes ago with this one, but just had to mention the highly anticipated release of Mint yesterday. This is the latest work from the mind of Shaun Inman. To pull a quote from his site…

“Mint gives you a short but sweet look at the how, what, where, and when of your site traffic.”

…and, it’s just so purty! Mint is such a dreamboat! I still have little cartoon birds flying around my head.

Hello from Silicon Valley. I’m out here on the other coast for the WOW Web Design and Project Management Conference. Presently, I am lounging in my cheetah print bath robe care of the Cypress Hotel where I’m staying — I highly recommend this place, it’s hard to beat the freakin’ cheetah print bath robe, come on!

Today was the first day. We had excellent presentations from Molly Holzschlag and Aaron Gustafson. They’re spreading their Web Standards joy across the galaxy and I am basking in the glory of CSS. Weird imagery, I know, especially after I already put the bath robe picture in your head — basking in a bath robe seems very personal…I’m feeling a little exposed now.

Moving on, I wanted to touch on something that Molly Holzschlag said that really resonated with me this morning. She talked a bit about how important it is for web designers to maintain passion and optimism and to avoid burnout. Just hearing her say that made me feel so validated! A career in web design is no doubt engaging and rewarding — however, it is a job centered around constraints. Those constraints often inspire creativity, but when you are on the brink of burnout, they can sometimes feel like the last straw.

For me, as long as the challenges that I face every day have something to do with my specialization, I’m happy. If they present me with an opportunity to learn, I am grateful. I do, however, have the danger of losing my optimism during those times when so many of my constraints cannot be solved by good web-smithing. For example, maybe a Marketing decision is driving the desire for an interface that will be a bad user experience. The site metrics show that the bad user experience is producing better sales than the interface that tested well with the customers. I cringe, sad face emoticon.

Despite these challenges, I do feel lucky to be a part of something that offers so many unending opportunities to learn, and to work with creative, intelligent, fun people. And, of course, I’m stoked to be rocking out in California with some of those people this week! Air guitar solo!

Just getting back from a phenomenal trip to California. ‘Twas the WOW Web Design and Project Management Workshop and I could not have imagineered a better trip. This was just what I needed — to take a step away from my work, share experiences with like-minded individuals, and generally refresh my state of mind.

Burnout has become an issue for me lately, I’ve been working 60 hr weeks (minimum) on high-intensity projects for several months now with no end in sight. This trip was just what I needed to sort of remind me why I’ve been working so hard, and why web designers that are passionate and committed to Web Standards are important.

It’s hard when you work in isolation as an in-house designer to feel like you are a part of a larger community of designers. Sure, I get my coffee and read the cool kids’ blogs every morning (including Molly and Andy from this week’s workshop), but I still felt like a bit of an outsider, longing for a day when I would work on projects where Web Standards are assumed, and not something that I am constantly struggling for. When that glorious day comes, I will be able to focus my energy on good design and good user experience, rather than fruitless elevator pitches for Web Standards ROI. Will it have been worth it? Absolutely.

Thanks to the presenters this week, Molly Holzshlag, Aaron Gustafson, and Andy Clarke. They sent me back to the east coast with a renewed sense of optimism about what I do. I hope to bump into them at SXSW with cheery reports of the aforementioned “glorious day” having come and gone! Thanks also to WOW for putting together this event, and everything that they’re doing to spread the Standards word. Holla back y’all!