Compass Designs

There is such a glut of web designers these days, how is the consumer able to tell the good from the bad. Well, it’s not how you would think. The marketing of a design firm, or their size, or their office is no indication of the quality of their websites they make. Neither are awards they show on their site, many of them are link exchange schemes.

Recently the Disney Store in the UK (disneystore-shopping.disney.co.uk ) redesigned their site with a “reputable” big design firm. The result was a huge backlash from the design professional community. The new site was using design practices that were 5 years old and made a highly inefficient site. Before they changed it, Disney was showing up in Google selling “spacer gifs” which are extra layout images, an out-dated way of designing out a site.

The result was an open letter to Disney which had huge support.

Needless to say, Disney changed the site. Fortunately, there is a rough test that takes 5 seconds to do. There exists a set of “standards” for web design. Think of them as building codes for web sites. The director of the organization that creates them is Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. You can visit their site (http://validator.w3.org) and type in a site to see how well it meets these standards. A quick test is to type in a design firm’s web site to see if it meets standards. If you have time you can even test a few from their portfolio. Now, you don’t have to follow building codes when you build a house, but wouldn’t you rather hire a contractor that did?”