This article is a must read! This guy Mike Davidson just participated in a major redesign of the ABC News Site. The breadth and wisdom is so significant that I have included this post in six of my blog categories (general, web design, css, html, news, rss).

First, he says some really understandable things about perfection in web design. The more people, the greater the project, the less perfection matters, even though it is a goal to continuously improve. Second he advocates absolute positioning (something Franki feels strongly against) even though it wasn’t used in this particular redesign. Third he points out the significance to sites of getting on the rss bandwagon as more and more readers will not visit your traditional site until, unless you tickle their interest via your rss feeds. Fourth, he justifies the move to xhtml for the same reasons I think it is important. Fifth, he talks about the importance of CMS systems which also seems to me to be a clear direction the web is going.

He does several other cool things, like allow you to pick themes, control the font size, etc. via his side bar. I might add Mike to my list of web heros. I only have a couple so far: Paul McFedries – who made html simple for me when I started, Zen Garden and David Seigel of Creating Killer Web Sites (appears his stuff is archived and bastardized to some extent now … with google ads and stuff — guess he let that domain lapse?). David is under consideration.

I want to thank my friend (well maybe new aquaintance I like, so far, but we are working on it 🙂 ) Reese for the link to this site.

This article was posted on Saturday, October 23rd, 2004 at 4:19 pm