CSS & Daring Do…

Hey, does James still have a desk there or what?

I was just surfing the intarweb tonight and ran across the website for the home of MI6. It’s an extremely well put together site. I’m sure they had an external company develop it for them, I mean it’s not like they have any secret or critical data on the public facing side of the DMZ…

Anyway, so I was poking around the source code, and I am extremely impressed. For an organization that is obviously huge, and really has no history of a web presence – the site is coded keeping standards in mind is organized entirely using CSS and Standards. So for this I have to give them huge props! Most organizations would not have gone about it this way – regardless of the budget. It’s easier to slap some tables on a page and let Dreamweaver and/or FrontPage do all the work.

Not a table to be found. I looked at probably a dozen of the pages on the site too. I’m not overly crazy about the actual design of the site, although it is a good, strong well thought out design, but the craftsmanship behind the creation of the site is superb. The only thing I can really fault them on is the totally obscure page names. Page50.html, page79.html? WTF? Come on. Ever hear of site searching, crawlers and oh I don’t know… Google? How are folks supposed to figure out the site contents with lousy names like that? the highest number I saw was 120.html… oops. Which gives me a 404. Maybe they don’t care – but you would think they would. I mean, come on.. you went through all the effort of creative a Web Standards site, why not make it even better – it’s all about the users. Anyway, this might be telling… the index page:page79.html. The careers page:page4.html.

Any way, check it out. It’s a nice site and an excellent example of the way things should be done.

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