[thelist] Wired News Site Update - What do you think?

[aardvark]

> From: "rudy" <p428 at interlog.com>
>
> >http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55675,00.html
>
> woohoo!!    thanks for letting us know, bob
>
> i'm surprised that there hasn't been any comment on this here yet

well, i *was* looking under the hood, but ben gustafson already found
some of the font sizing stuff i was starting to look at...  they'll
be more chatter over the weekend...

> wired is a huge site, both in terms of the number of pages that had to
> be converted -- people, think about it, how long would it take you to
> convert a huge site to a tableless design? never mind coming up with
> bullet-proof templates based on css, just the sheer work of conversion
> -- and also in terms of bandwidth, because apparently they get 20-25
> million page hits a month (to borrow a number posted by eric meyer on
> another list)

erm, *if* their CMS is good enough, and they've properly developed
their templates in the past, and left nasty mark-up out of their core
content, then it's actually not as hard as you might think...

you test the templates, you replace the templates, you test your most
extreme pages and work back up the tree...

i've got a couple sites with thousands of pages where a template
change (once the template itself was tested) was a half hour task,
and then all the pages were done... of course, i helped build the
CMS, and coded all the pages, and ensured people weren't embedding
crap HTML into their content...

granted, that development and testing is the time sink... *i'd* be
more interested in their dev/testing process...

> i'm pumped about it, and i don't even like wired

this isn't one of those things that's really going to help the
argument to convert all sites, though... just as zeldman's redesign
didn't *really* change the way browsers run or upgrade anyone's
systems, this isn't going to really affect anyone outside of their
readers -- generally a net/tech-savvy bunch already...

i'd be interested in seeing their browser stats and how they compare
to, say, a bank's traffic, or a car dealer, or a site that sells
small monkeys to big monkeys...

--
Read the evolt.org case study
Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself
http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904151035/evoltorg02-20
ISBN: 1904151035