• Home
  • Sustainable Design
• A Sustainable Web?
  • A Foreign Concept
  • Glossary of Terms
• Design Concept
  • The Importance of Visual Design
  • Design Impact
  • Potential Harm of Good Design
  • Getting Started Designing
• Material Treatment
  • You Are How You Treat
  • Naming Files and Folders
  • Naming for Indexing and Clarity
  • Naming for Versioning
  • Mistreating Your Images: 7 Deadly Sins
• Document Structure (XHTML)
  • The Concept of a Markup Language
  • A Brief History of HTML
  • Basic XHTML Rules
  • XHTML DOCTYPE Declarations
  • XHTML Tag Types: Block and Inline
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: Block-level Tags
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: List Tags
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: In-line Tags
• Advanced Document Structure
  • Working with Classes and IDs
  • Classes in Action
  • IDs in Action
• Document Presentation (CSS)
  • Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets
  • Some CSS Vocabulary
  • CSS Selectors
  • CSS Properties: Text and Font
  • CSS Properties: Margin, Padding, and Border
• CSS for Design and Layout
  • Background Images
  • Image Replacement Techniques
• Introduction to PHP
  • What is PHP?
  • Repeating Content Across Pages

A Foreign Concept

The concept of a sustainable Web is not necessarily familiar to us. In fact, the Web that most of us know is anything but sustainable. We frequently encounter dead Web sites—a site whose content is outdated, or even that, by virtue of its appearance, give us the sense that the site's owner stopped working on the content long ago.

Although in some cases this could indicate a careless attitude on the part of the site's content developer, it's probably more indicative of the difficulty of updating the site. And if we think about it really cynically, it might be that the site's content wasn't worth maintaining in the first place.

But the Web can be a thriving, sustainable place, with each of us as Web authors doing our part to make it that way. So let's look at some of the steps we can take for making a sustainable Web.

Caring About (and for) Content

The first guideline for sustainability in Web development is an obvious one: it's absolutely essential to care about the content you're placing on the Web. If you don't care about it, why should anyone else? And if you don't care about it the day it goes live, why would you care about it a month or a year or five years down the road? You won't. The Web is not in need of more junky pages, so whatever you have to contribute, make sure that you're invested in it.

Taking Your Time

Most of us have experienced a rushed urge to just get something up on the Web. This manifests itself in half-built sites with frequent assurances or warnings that THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

A sustainable site is, of course, always under construction (aka improvement, revision, expansion). But the shortcuts we can take to throw content up on the Web, everything from using the Save as HTML function in Word to treating a Web site as a filing cabinet for PDFs or Word documents, tend to make it that much harder to take care of the content later on.

If a site or page is not easily editable and expandable, we're not going to edit or expand it. If editing content breaks the design of a page that's built using HTML tables, we're going to leave it alone—even if we know the content desperately needs work.

From "How to do this?" to "How to do this right?"

Most of us think about Web technologies in terms of software packages: should I use FrontPage or Dreamweaver or AdobeGoLive or Flash or...or...or? This is wrong thinking (though the market forces of Web authoring technology, of course encourage it), in part because there's no guarantee that a software package is going to exist in even another year. And with the exception of Flash, which is actually just a file format (versus a markup language like HTML) that is often served over the Web, Web pages, e.g., HTML—or as we'll learn, XHTML—should be editable in everything from Notepad to Dreamweaver. The number two reason to say NO to FrontPage is that it intentionally adds garbage code to make it difficult or impossible to edit FrontPage's code in any other application; the number one reason is that pages created in FrontPage are not viewable in all browsers.

Members of a sustainable Web will not have allegiances to any particular software, but to the organizations like the W3C that help oversee the languages and standards that everyone can use to create Web pages, and that everyone, regardless of equipment or ability, can access well into the future.

Updated on Wed. Jan. 2 2008 at 01:20PM