Mick's World

In the last year or so all the hype about WebStandards, Usability, Accessibility, Web 2.0, etc. has kept the web development community on it’s toes. So why then are there still so many Australian based sites falling behind?

It seems like it’s taken a while for a lot of Australian Web designers to produce good looking sites. Now they just need to make them standards compliant.

As all this standards stuff has been going on for some time, you’d expect that at least the Web design firms would be the first to get it right. However this does not seem to be the case.

Here’s a couple firms that produce quality looking sites, but seem to have fallen behind on the standards front.

• WDG Alfresco
• Digicon

What’s stopping them from keeping up with the rapid movements of the Web? Is it lack of information being provided specifically to Australians about standards? Or is it that they have already made their site and they want to stick with something they know works?

What’s stopping them from reproducing the site to ensure good semantics are used and that their site validates?

There are a lot a questions to be answered. A couple of really good places to start answering these questions are W3Schools and WaSP.

Obviously things are moving so fast that when you’re busy it’s hard to keep up, but when it’s what you do for a living why shouldn’t you at least update your site which is likely to be a prime point of advertising for your company. Sure a lot of companies have established their client base and have already designed many sites within previous years that wouldn’t meet standards and just aren’t worth going back and redoing for the sake of being standards compliant. But there should be an effort to at least make all the new client work as well as the company site, semantically correct, validated XHTML and be usable and accessible.

If the existing developers aren’t going to take action and move forward then it’s up to the current ones to make it happen. Also Australia shouldn’t be left behind, there are many things that we’ve excelled in and should continue to within the Web industry.