Popularity: 0
Vote:   | At ESPN, we are blessed with a user base that is about 98% standards-compliant. Some of this might be because a large part of our audience is young savvy Internet users, and some might be because the majority of our traffic comes from the workplace. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Because the competitive landscape of the web is such that the site which looks and works best gets the most traffic, developers and designers put a premium on the presentation of that content and let structural markup take a back seat. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Blogs are a great way to monitor and even participate in the chatter about your new site. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | ESPN always seeks to present a unique looking front page through the use of typographically styled headlines, large photos, video embedded directly into the page, and interactive Flash features like our new Flash 6 photo gallery. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | ESPN.com allows customers, free-of-charge, to use our vast online sports resource in exchange for one thing: exposure to advertising and sponsorships. This is how TV works, and this is also basically how newspapers and magazines work as well. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Essentially, we have four publishing modes: regular, twin-top, skirmish, and war. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | Everyone agreed that embracing standards was the right thing to do, and the only downside which needed further exploration was how many users of older browsers would be negatively affected by our proposed change. When we saw that only 2% of our users were not equipped with standards-compliant browsers, the decision was a relative slam-dunk. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | For most of the '90s and the first part of this decade, content providers who wanted to publish online only needed to worry about the graphical web browser. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | For the tiny percentage of people who are negatively affected by our embracing of standards, they can just get their sports somewhere else in the meantime. It's not like we're denying them hospital care. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | I didn't get into design to be an artist. To me, an artist creates things to evoke emotion. Being a designer goes a step further than that, not only trying to evoke emotion but trying to make a reaction. It is very objective-driven, and that's what makes it interesting. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I don't start with a design objective, I start with a communication objective. I feel my project is successful if it communicates what it is supposed to communicate. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | I loudly applaud what the folks over at Wired have been able to do with their site in one fell swoop, but for better or for worse, ESPN is a much bigger beast. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I vertically center things in tables a lot, and the fact that there is no way to control vertical positioning in divs affects the way we do things across the board. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | If I somehow felt like having a site which strictly validates was an indication of my manhood, maybe I'd do it, but it really means very little to me. We're mavericks over here, what can we say? |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | If I was designing a web site for elementary school children, I might have a much higher percentage of older computers with outdated browsers since keeping up with browser and hardware technology has not traditionally been a strong point of most elementary schools. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If we can do them a favor by telling them how to improve their experience on the ESPN and the rest of the Internet, then why shouldn't we? We are a bit cocky over here so we feel that people should of course invest the 5 or 10 minutes it takes to upgrade in order to view our site. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It's all about people. It's about networking and being nice to people and not burning any bridges. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It's all about people. It's about networking and being nice to people and not burning any bridges. Your book is going to impress, but in the end it is people that are going to hire you. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Now that digital lifestyle devices, tablets, wireless phones, and other Internet appliances are beginning to come of age, we need to worry about presenting our content to these devices so that it is optimized for their display capabilities. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Oh well, at least no one pays any attention to footers! |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Our basic strategy for this redesign was to just start with our big mamma-jamma, the ESPN.com front page, and then work outward from there. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Our Masters golf package looks completely different than our NFL Draft package-from the visual design right down to the underlying code. At times I am jealous of the templatized simplicity of the Wired site, but at other times I am glad that we add personality to pages and constantly launch new designs. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Our new story pages are on the way. With these new pages, users will have control over font, size, and leading of all body copy and their preference will be cookied and used throughout every other story page. It is amazing to me that more major sites are not already offering this as it makes a clear readability difference for some people. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Our old site did not have very good support for the disabled, but our new site should soon have much better support. With all of our content in divs now, we can hide all but the relevant chunks of content and navigation with a simple alternate CSS file. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Our traffic fluctuates with popular sports being in or out of season, but throughout the year, we get anywhere from about 1 to 1.3 billion page views per month. This is for all ESPN-owned sites. For just our site on the ESPN.com domain, we average anywhere from about a half a billion to 950 million page views per month. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Sometimes I feel like I could read entire phonebook cover-to-cover if it was styled in 11 Verdana with generous leading, but often I lose interest in even the shortest of articles if the type of display is sloppy or otherwise bothersome to me. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Sometimes people just won't upgrade unless they feel they really need to. We feel honored to help create this need. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Standards purists always recommend that you don't design with pixel precision, but we have done just that, with no code forking, no alternate stylesheets, and no box model hacks. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Telling me my site needs to validate in order to be standards-compliant is like telling me I need a flag in my lawn to call myself an American. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The decision to redirect proprietary non-compliant browsers to our upgrade page has always been primarily about education. The fact is, most people who are still using these browsers are simply unaware of their deficiencies. No one has ever told them otherwise, so they figure the rest of the world uses the same browser they do. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There were really only three things we couldn't do with this redesign: properly position our partner-specific footer at the bottom of the page, use vertical alignment within divs, and achieve validation. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There's only one big piece of advice I can provide and that is to know your audience. We would have never gone to a tableless layout if we thought a significant amount of our audience used non-compliant browsers. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Vertical alignment within divs is probably the single biggest oversight by the W3C when they created standards for div-based layouts. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | We are constantly working towards the highest level of compliance possible. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | We found a way to make things look great to the human eye through the window of a graphical web browser without worrying about what everything looked like under the hood. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | We fully expect our competitors to join us in embracing open standards with their next redesigns. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We learned the importance of soliciting feedback before and after a relaunch and making ]any appropriate improvements as quickly as possible. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | We reduced the size of our front page code by about 50%, and by using absolute positioning, we are able to display important parts of the page before other parts may have fully loaded yet. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | We use our own homegrown CMS, which is called GoPublish. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | We'd rather assertively tell you why your browser needs to be updated than show you an ugly shadow of our front page and have you assume we did something wrong. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When I see a style that I have never seen before on the Web, that inspires me, there is a lot more to be done with this medium. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | When you have a site like ours which dynamically writes out a lot of content, uses third-party statistical tracking, makes liberal use of Flash, and offers complex and flexible advertising modules, validation is simply a pie in the sky. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Workers in the web development industry are always looking to stay ahead of the development curve so their skills don't become obsolete. By giving them a way to further their skillsets and write next-generation code on one of the most visited sites in the world, we are helping them become the best designers, developers, and producers they can be. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Writing old school HTML code was never very much fun but now it's getting downright tedious for most people. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | You can have information and ease of use and have artistic integrity at the same time. The art of being a good Web designer is getting yourself into that middle ground and treating it as a final destination instead of as a compromise. |