Alright, no one told me this being married thing would make my life ÃÃâ€Â â€â„¢Ãƒƒƒâ€Å¡Ãƒƒâہ¡ÃƒÆ’‚¯ÃƒƒÃ†’âââہ¡Ãƒâ€šÃ‚¬ÃƒÆ’…¡Ãƒƒâ€Å¡Ãƒƒâہ¡ÃƒÆ’‚¿ÃƒƒÃ†’âââہ¡Ãƒâ€šÃ‚¬ÃƒÆ’…¡Ãƒƒâ€Å¡Ãƒƒâہ¡ÃƒÆ’‚½ber hectic! I probably shouldn’t be complaining, though. Being busy means I have lots of work. Which = money. Which results in happy Matt. So it all works out in the end. Just seems that it all started shortly before our wedding day, and there’s no sign of slowing down in the near future.
Speaking of ‘work’. Media Press has been doing great lately. I’ve been focusing on creating standards compliant sites and it’s totally paid off, in a very short time. I was approached by a designer that used to be a part of The Takeover Group. He’s on his own now and needs some help cutting and building sites. It’ll be nice for a change, to not have to deal with any design work or the clients at all. He’ll hand me a finished design and I’ll cut and build a template for him. Easy-peasy!
I soft-launched my first full-Flash site this week. I’m really stoked on the outcome and I managed to accomplish many new things in a very short time. It definitely stands apart from my previous work. But it will be good to show people that I can do a nice clean site as well. Check out the new reelsuite site here.
Microsoft redesigned their homepage recently. I was completely blown away at first – then remembered who’s site I was looking at. I don’t understand how one of the largest corporations in the world with the most employees and most money can’t make a decent website. There’s 25 errors in the HTML (they didn’t even include the document type) and countless CSS errors. They must have used Frontpage to code it and proofed it in IE only. Way to set an example. At least the new Mozilla site validates – at 4.01 Strict I might add!
Hannah started school this week. She’s a full time student now! Grade 1. Wow, do I ever feel old! I totally remember everything from Kindergarten on – and it doesn’t seem like all that long ago. It’s pretty cool dropping her off in the morning. Seeing her friends run up to her saying her name “Hannah! Hannah!” – then they skip off holding hands. Wicked cute! She seems to be quite the popular one amongst her peers. Which is cool. Not so much cause I want her to be ‘the cool kid’. But she’s really her own person. As funny as that might sound, since she’s just turned 6 and all. But honestly, she couldn’t care less what people think about her. She does what she wants, wears what she wants and hangs out with the people she likes. Her two best friends are Shyanne and Misha. Shyanne has some disabilities. She had leg and arm braces and walks with a bit of a limp. She’s also in a special needs class. But Hannah doesn’t even acknowledge those things and absolutely loves her! Misha is a very shy, little black girl from down the hall. Living in Whitby (aka White-by), you don’t see a whole lot of other races. Misha’s the only black girl in her class and one of the few in the entire school. I just think it’s cool that Hannah looks past their differences and enjoys them as people for who they are. I can’t say I remember things being all that ‘friendly’ when I was her age. I’m not sure if it’s just her innocence at this point. Hopefully it’s a quality within that she carries as she grows up.
5 people have had something to contribute so far.
Just to explain Microsoft’s strategy on their website,
Microsoft doesn’t make money by writing code or html, they make money by selling software. It’s a business decision; it’s about the bottom line. Does a website with 25 html errors still sell software? I guess some exec there made the decision that yes, it does.
Building a better mouse trap only catches more mice, it doesn’t sell more mouse traps.
http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2004/04/22.html – this guy says it best.
Now I’m not knocking the value of having a perfectly valid website (I’m sure mines a cesspool of errors, but it got me a job at a Microsoft partner) I’m just explaining the difference between your business (to design web sites) and their business (to sell software).
A valid argument. But I don’t agree with you in regards to having a valid site and it’s impact, or lack of, on the sales of their software.
It’s one thing that it doesn’t validate – it’s another that it displays completely different in any browser aside from IE. If you’re not going to make a valid website, you can at least check it in other browsers and make sure it displays correctly.
The fact that they make and sell software that creates produces shitty code and they also provide every customer with a built in browser (that you can’t get rid of, I might add) that doesn’t render websites properly is where you lose me. They should be setting the standard, if anything.
That dude’s argument that it takes too long to create a valid site. And that time not being worth the effort is BS. You can learn proper code just as easily as you learned half-assed code. I only started producing sites that validate over the past couple months. And it’s only been a few months since I first launched a CSS based site. It’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, hard to accomplish. I believe, taking the time to learn how to code properly is worth having your site accessible by a wider audience and having it display properly across the board.
There are more variables than that.
Microsoft has a massive amount of content on many sites, which have been around for years. How long have these standards been around?
Where would they draw the line on how valid their html is? Maybe having all of their content perfectly valid would cost them an extra 500,000k a year in man hours.. But is anyone screaming at them for it? I know the “good enough� strategy seems cheap and they *should* be the ones going all out.. But that’s not their strategy and it never has been. And it’s their “ready, fire, aim� strategy that’s gotten them to #1.
I agree IE sucks and I’m moving away from it too, and they are fixing that because it’s affecting their bottom line. Now if people were up and arms over those 25 html errors I’m pretty sure they’d disappear.
But then again maybe I’m a little biased over here seeing as Microsoft pays my rent:)
This little redesign we’re discussing is over their homepage, only! They’ve only applied a basic header to the other/older pages. Try and validate a page in the support section. hah… 141 errors.
So basically, what you’re saying is… Microsoft don’t give a shit about the quality of their product. Only that it works. Not that it works well… that it works. Regardless of their seemingly endless budget.
They’re only #1 because they have money – and the only place they come in first is when you’re talking dollars. Sooooo…
And again, it’s not just the fact that it doesn’t validate. Most importantly, it appears different across browsers and platforms. = lame!
And lastly, it’s hard to trust a company to produce good software when they can’t even handle creating a good website. I mean, HTML has got to be the easiest language out there.
PS. What are you using when you post comments? It’s creating illegal characters and fucking up my perfect code! haha…
oh i used outlook, yea thats screwed up my stuff before too.
heh, all i mean was microsoft had to choose its level of quality, like theres a line to be drawn, they are a business. maybe they are pushing towards 100% but their website is a massive entity using different generations of technologies in pretty much every language. the msdn alone is a few gigs of online content at LEAST. Not just static html files but content stored in databases and html thats generated in code, i shudder at the thought of digging through thousands of lines of old pearl and asp to upgrade it. poor bastards.
i did a few other sites, even sun.com had errors, heh thats a good tool to have though, im going to get my next project to be 100%
p.s your new design is wicked