vanderwal.net

Nate Koechley posts his WebVision 2004 presentation on Web Standards and IA. This flat out rocks as it echos what I have been doing and refining for the last three years or more. The development team at work has been using this nearly exclusively for about couple years now on redesigns and new designs. This process makes things very easy to draft in simple wireframe. Then move to functional wireframes with named content objects in the CSS as well as clickable. The next step is building the visual presentation with colors and images.

This process has eased the lack of content problem (no content no site no matter how pretty one thinks it is) often held up by "more purple and make it bigger" contingents. This practice has cut down development and design time in more than half and greatly decreases maintenance time. One of the best attributes is the decreased documentation time as using the Web Developer Extension toolbar in Firefox exposes the class and id attributes that provide semantic structure (among many other things this great tool provides). When the structure is exposed documentation becomes a breeze. I can not think of how or why we ever did anything differently.

Hey, thanks for the nice writeup. I'd love to learn more about the process you're using, and hear more about how and where our ideas mesh, and discuss how to mature this process even more. cheers, nate

By the way, since you are linking to the pre-conference draft copy, I thought you and your readers might be interested in the final versions, which I've posted here: http://natek.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/web_visions_pre.html Not much changed between versions, but this newer post includes web-friendly animation-free versions, as well as a PDF. Cheers, Nate