WSA Winner
Sunday June 5th, 2005
In the search for the new, the fashionable and the -- sometimes painfully -- distinct, it is all too easy to overlook the established. Besides, for my first review I was looking for a site that typifies my feelings about what constitutes good, solid, standards-based design. It seems almost inevitable that I was going to look to a well respected designer.
Roger's is not a design that tries to mug your senses when you first arrive and for that reason it is all too easy to take it for granted. Spend a little time there, though, and the attention to detail starts to reveal itself, from the perfectly executed combination of elastic and liquid layout techniques, the tight typography, all the way through to a navigation set that reacts in all the right ways. The unassuming nature of the design is also it's biggest success; whereas many sites begin to grate a little after numerous visits, 456 Berea Street simply settles down as a comfortable backdrop to the excellent content.
Given the nature of that content, Roger can be pretty certain who his audience is and it would have been all too easy for him to ignore certain browsers, or dismiss lower screen resolutions but he has done neither. The result is a site that practices what it preaches and a look under the hood reveals almost obsessively tidy CSS and XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml for those browsers that can cope.
How many of us can say we've achieved that on our personal sites?
Reviewed by John Oxton
#1
Link wrong :\
Posted by Mo-Ti :: June 5th, 2005 at 08:10 AM
#2
Oppps! My bad :) Should be okay now.
Posted by John Oxton :: June 5th, 2005 at 08:14 AM
#3
It is a brilliant example of bullet-proof web design, the only thing that lets it down is it is powered by Movable Type - should be Textpattern :)
Posted by Dave :: June 5th, 2005 at 12:39 PM
#4
I am really glad to see this site win the award. Since the very first day I googled web standards this site has been a great source of inspiration and useful information.
Posted by Conánn :: June 5th, 2005 at 04:14 PM
#5
I hate leaving a small negative comment because what was said about this site, especially the attention to detail and clean code, is absolutely true, but I have a bigger problem with the typography. It might just be me, but the heavy use of bold letters on the front page, the bold and underlined links etc. might be the thing in respect to usability and accesibility, but it just gives the page an unbalanced look. Too much going on.
On the other hand, maybe those many good standards-based sites that are around nowadays have changed our perception a bit by NOT doing it right and removing lots of the link hints, underlining, bold lettering, etc.? I don't know.
Still, otherwise an excellent example of how things can be done right and, once you start studying the details, also an example for the amount of work a good and well-coded site demands. I shudder at the thought of how much preliminary work and experience one needs to invest to put one of these babies online. Respect!
Posted by deus62 :: June 10th, 2005 at 12:30 PM
Comments on: 456 Berea Street