Inc.com Redesign

I’m happy to announce another large, commercial site that has been redesigned with table-less, structured, XHTML markup and CSS for layout. Today at work we (the Fast Company/Inc. web team) launched the new Inc.com.

I got to fly solo on the design for this version, building on what we had done previously with Fast Company back in March. The XHTML structure is very similar, with good reason. Both sites now run off of the same content management system which was built in-house, and with the same team running both sites — it only makes sense to keep things similar where it doesn’t compromise the brand of each magazine.

A few other noteables:

• Over 11,000 pages were cleaned up and validated due in large part to the help of a couple of hard-working temps. The magazine archives span over 17 years of content, so you can imagine the wacky HTML we encountered.
• The home page file size (HTML alone) went from 52K down to just 24K. Removing the 3 or 4 deep nested table stucture was extremely satisfying. It’s darn fast now.
• There is a healthy use of background to hold many of the interface images (heading icons, list bullets, header backgrounds, etc.) and it was designed to easily change colors completely by updating the CSS whenever we get sick of the current ones.
• There are dusty corners yet to be cleaned out and little tweaks here and there, however most of the site should validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Now it’s time to fix bugs and clean up various parts of the site that need updating. Onward.

You may also notice a slight redesign to this very site as well. Just a subtle update to coincide, while “borrowing” a few elements from the Inc. design. If you don’t notice anything different, you may just need to refresh.