Presence
I’ve just finished the new website for Presence Multimedia, the company I work for. Ages ago we put up a small holding site until work had finished on a planned re-design, but then we got swamped with work and criminally forgot about our own site. Just recently however, we took the opportunity to spend time on re-building it, and earlier this week we put it online.
We’ve made an effort to make available the majority of our creative output over the last 4 years, not just websites we’ve built for clients, but also some of the R&D stuff we produce that, for whatever reason, never sees the light of day. Almost all the content is database driven, so expect new case studies and bits'n'bobs to filter through as copy is written and demo’s are created.
We’ve also built in a weblog and a photolog (strikingly similar in format to this website...) so myself and my colleagues can regularly contribute to the site with issues and links concerning themselves, not just corporate news.
I’ve been careful to build it all semantically and structurally correct, and it validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. In the next few weeks I plan to try and get it validating with XHTML 1.0 Strict, then maybe XHTML 1.1, but one step at a time.
I’d appreciate any feedback regarding the site at all - bugs, layout weirdness or opinions on design and functionality. Good or bad - I can take it!
Posted 4 years, 12 months ago on 10th October 2003.
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Comments
Cheers for the feedback Mal. I’ve fixed the ecards demo - it was trying to retrieve images from a directory on our development server (which is password protected). I’ve moved the images to a public directory so it should be okay now.
Phil · 4 years, 12 months ago
Very nice. :)
Tommy · 4 years, 12 months ago
Really really nice work, so nice on the eye, and easy to navigate - everything a design studio’s site should be!
IIRC, XHTML 1.1 *must* be served with a mime type of application/xml+xhtml. Are you planning on doing that when you migrate?
Nice work, by the way. Very impressive design, proper coding. Non-CSS sites look ugly to me, these days. I love Mozilla Firebird with font anti-aliasing!
"XHTML 1.1 *must* be served with a mime type of application/xml+xhtml"
Good point Tim. I read this somewhere on the webdesign-l mailing list. If memory serves, I think there’s an issue with IE6 not displaying pages with this mime-type specified.
If this is correct - it wouldn’t make sense to publish a corporate website which is inaccessible to a large proportion of the net, so migration to XHTML 1.1 might have to wait till MS get off their monopolistic arse and update IE ;-)
Phil · 4 years, 11 months ago
Phil,
You can stick with XHTML 1.0 Trans or Strict and still be way ahead of most people out there. Then you can sniff the http_accept CGI variable using PHP and send the browser the page as application/xml+xhtml if it’s in the http_accept, or text/html if it’s not.
Great tip Tim.
Hopefully the updated version of IE will accept the correct mime-type, but until that day arrives, this is a useful workaround.
Phil · 4 years, 11 months ago
Very smart site, good job.
I have my site up to transitional and want to start work on strict, not sure how now the validator says its good transitional. Dont know if anyone has this problem or know what to do next?
And would it be possible to borrow your little ‘validated’ pictures?
(not using your bandwidth but I’ll take them off if its not)
-Dave (Work Experience May 2002)
Solved my own problem
The Extended Interface allows you to check for a particular version of xhtml
http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html
Hope that helps somebody
Thanks for the comments Dave. Good to see that your work experience with us last year hasn’t put you off web design for good!
Feel free to help yourself to the validation buttons on my website. I ‘borrowed’ them myself from Antipixel.com -
http://www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2002/10/22/steal_these_buttons.html
Phil · 4 years, 11 months ago
For ages, the one thing that’s frustrated me about your sites is the inability to resize the text. Then I got Firebird. Now I can resize. So... how come IE can’t scale things? Is this built into the design e.g. feed IE a different stylesheet, or is it a peculiarity of the browser?
Apologies for my laziness - it’s because you use pixels for the font-size, isn’t it? And Firebird doesn’t regard this as a fixed-size option, whereas IE, being an older browser, does. Right?
If that is the case, was resizing text not a priority for the design? Loads of design firms seem to have 11px text, which suits young eyes and those with a design fetish, but might be hard to read for older potential clients, who are probably browsing with IE. While I personally appreciate the smaller font, it’s always struck me as an accessibility problem. Is browser distribution really still at a point where the Give Me Pixels Or Give Me Death mantra (alistapart.com) rules?
Very good points Mal. You’re right about IE Win awkward behaviour. Other browsers (like Firebird) implement this behaviour correctly and allow users to re-size text.
It’s an issue thrown up by IE which can cause a few problems. If you care about accurate font size rendering then pixels are the way to go (ems, pts, percentages and keywords appear differently across browsers and setups), but then you have to be aware that IE Win users won’t be able to resize your text.
A way around this is to offer a ‘large text’ style-switcher which notches up all your font-sizes a few pixels (which is what alistapart does). Another method is to use the @import feature to load an advanced style sheet with pixels specified. Browsers like IE Win won’t understand the @import feature and use your simpler stylesheet (without pixels specified) instead.
I have to admit that I don’t implement these features as much as I should - maybe I’ll make the effort now you’ve brought it up!
Phil · 4 years, 11 months ago
I thought the best practice re. fonts now was to give NS4 (and IE4, though hardly anyone uses *that* any more) pixels in your basic style sheet, then use font-size keywords in an advanced sheet, with a box-model hack to give IE the one-out keywords it wants, then give everyone else the right keywords.
One other thing: watch your rendering mode - Moz and Opera emulate IE’s wrong behaviour when in quirks mode.
Very nice. I’ll never tire of red/black/grey/white design. One thing mind - when I received my own e-card(!), a password-protection box popped up in my email and the photos didn’t load. Have I just missed something?
mal · www · 4 years, 12 months ago