Why, Oh Why

I was chatting today with a great Web developer that’s a friend. We’ve hired his firm many times in the past five years, and I respect him very much. I was chatting with him online and told him about my experience at Refresh ‘06 and my eyes being opened. The idea of having a standards-based, accessible, site. Content separated from design. CSS driven. No tables. And that I am pretty much a newbie when it comes to this. I thought he’d be excited.

Instead, he was busting my chops. Why? He came a year or so ago for a one-day training in CSS. We worked on a project, took notes, and watched him do amazing things with CSS. When it was done, it looked beautiful. We enjoyed the time, thanked him, got excited about CSS, but our jobs began to crowd out our vigor. I was pulled out on a 6-month video project to write, interview, edit and produce. We lost the momentum.

What’s necessity? Yeah. To use a Biblical metaphor, it’s Shaddrach, Meshach, Abendigo, and Jason. Thrown into the firey furnace.

We’ve been evaluating every piece of content on the site, putting it all in Excel, and evaluating. Now we’ve got what we’ve been told is a “Content Inventory Matrix” of all content on arbor.edu. It’s pretty daunting. We still don’t know how to use the CMS we bought. Still no knowledge of CSS or XHTML. But I have been using everything I’ve read from Don’t Make Me Think to get the content right and user experience/IA in the right direction. So, who knows what’s up the road? We’ve got the lamp shining a step or two ahead. Not much farther.