Fixpert

That’s right, “Tables Begone.” It’s kind of like Smells Begone®. Ug, that lingering musty scent of tables. It’s still lingers in places around the Crutchfield site, but with this quick redesign we made some serious progress.

Go to Crutchfield’s homepage and if you’ve got the Web Developer extension for Firefox, outline the table cells and bask in our glory:

Ok, ok, so there’s one table cell in there, and we will phase that out over time. As you get deeper into the site, you’ll notice tables are still around, but far less tables than before. Most importantly, this redesign represents a move in the right direction.

There were so many tables on this site. It was common to see a table used just to put a 1 pixel border around another table. It was perfectly normal to see a table, or multiple tables, that weren’t doing anything and that no one could account for. Another big issue was the ASP that was driving the site. This is a dynamic, database-driven site, which means that any given page can have dozens of different display variations depending on the specifics of that user’s session. And, having not separated structure, behavior, and presentation, our ASP code was woven into a sort of Chinese Finger Trap with html tables. Glancing through our source code, you would see an asp variable in place of the colspan value for a table cell. So, you might see some logic that said “If the user has logged into their account, then this table cell gets a colspan of 3, otherwise it gets a colspan of 2.” Seeing code like this really worried me. I had built sites using CSS before, but I had never tried to take a giant dynamic site like this and recode it for web standards. And with all the reading of blogs that I do online, I had never seen anyone write a clean concise article about “it can be done, here’s how to transform your giant, bloated dynamic site into a CSS work horse.” So, let me say for the doubters and haters out there, yes it can be done. I know we’re still in transition, but we’ve made enough progress where I am now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Hang in there dudes and dudettes!

Keep checking in for more. Up next: span class=”bogus!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.