Faster Company

At last. Following the lead of sites like Wired and ESPN, we (fastcompany.com web team) have redesigned and relaunched the Fast Company web site today using web standards. This time, the site runs on valid, tableless XHTML for markup, and CSS for 100% of its presentation and layout. I was fortunate to be able to co-design much of the interface, with Art Director Daigo Fujiwara and it was nice to really exploit the features of CSS throughout.

Some things to note:

• The page size has been cut in half over the previous, nested table layout.
• The entire site’s color pallete can be changed instantly each month to coordinate with the current issue’s magazine cover (something we were doing subltly before with images)
• Accessibility for devices such as phones, PDAs, speech browsers, etc. has been greatly increased
• Over 70 issues of magazine content were cleaned up and validated. Perhaps 20% of the site still needs work, of which we’ll clean up over the coming months.

I’m pointing this stuff out not to toot our own horn, but to back up standards-based markup with some real facts. I’ll certainly be sharing more findings as they come in (and yes, I’m expecting many users to be upset — especially those still using version 4.x browsers).

Shout outs are in order for those whose previous efforts and public tutorials have helped the direction of the new site: Douglas Bowman (Wired), Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer and Mark Pilgrim (accessibility).