Reckon I'm from Venus (but I keep a place on Mars)

In which a shade-tree designer learns something about proprietary lock-in, accessible code, and life in general.

The fine folks over at A List Apart have re-published an article from 2000 about the eternal, everlasting war between accessibility and design, between things looking cool and things being logical and navigable. When I took Electronic Writing and Publishing in school (Georgia State offers classes in Digital Rhetoric), which was shortly after this article's publication, we talked a lot about "mystery meat" icons, and flat sites composed entirely of graphic elements, and usability testing. 

All this was going through my mind when I started working a new site for an artist client - we had some very specific ideas about the layout, which was to be simple yet very specific in terms of typography and positioning of elements. In the end, I elected to bypass elegant markup in favor of a completely flat design in order to make the website function as a print piece delivered online. This decision was driven mostly by the maddening state of browser rendering and code compatibility - things that looked perfect in Safari and Firefox and Opera and Camino looked broken in IE6, but fine in IE7 (sometimes). Of course, trying to govern the precise placement of graphic elements relative to HTML text was causing problems, so I ended up setting the type in Illustrator and outputting the entire site as sliced images, and using rollovers and image maps for the links. I felt better that this was a brochure site for an artist - I didn't need to worry so much about screen-reader access.

If I were a better coder, I could have made things work properly, but I feel like more of a designer who can do a little coding. I want to try building an entire site in Coda, which does much less hand-holding than Dreamweaver and has no WYSIWYG mode. Maybe my code-fu will improve and I can build sites like the big boys. 

I did, however, recently build this site, which is closer to being an elegant, minimal site that relies more on proper coding for layout. I did use Dreamweaver templates, and for a minute during the build I couldn't get DW to launch (ended up reinstalling) and I had to some updating by hand in a text editor - templates make this very difficult, because linked files don't automatically update the way they do in DW when you edit something in the template. I'll be looking for a different way to do this in the future.