A Designer’s Mind
And Other Corrosive Materials from Outer Banks Design Works.
The New Outer Banks Design Works
After what seemed to be an eternity I finally got around to updating this website. The old site lasted for almost 4 years, but I had far outgrown that design before the first year was over. To be quite honest, the old site design was a throw-away job that I put together in a matter of days. I had just recently went from being a full-time employee with another local Web design company, with some freelance work on the side, to a full-time freelancer with more work than I could keep up with at times. I just took a weekend and threw together what I could get organized and that was pretty much how I left things. For 3.5 years.
Move to the Back of the Line, Buster
So why so long to redesign? Good question. I guess the summarized story would be something along the lines of that old adage, “the cobbler’s children wear no shoes.” I had a pretty steady stream of business from the day that I hung out my sign, so my own site just kept taking the back seat to my client work. That’s not to say that I didn’t try to get something new and more fitting put together for myself. On the contrary; I came up with and prototyped more than 4 different designs in that time period. And all of those designs ended their short lives in the trash bin. It was piecemeal design work where I would get a few hours once a month to try and put something together, only to end up months later, looking at the design and asking myself, “what the heck is this?”
I am my own worst critic — as are most of the well-respected designers I know — but once a design sits around for more than 3-6 months I grow tired of looking at it. In retrospect some of those designs may have been nicer than what I have now, but they just didn’t fit the look and feel that I was going for. So I would give up and just chug along on the client work, telling myself that I would get something going again real soon.
Attack of the Zombies
Another thing that kept coming to mind during those years were the countless hours I would spend hacking my designs to death for my clients in Internet Explorer 6. I had started to hate working when it came down to doing anything with that crusty, old browser. I had made a mental resolution to stop designing for IE6 completely by the year 2009, so maybe I was subconsciously waiting for that browser to roll over and die beforehand. But like those brain-eating zombies from that old horror movie it just kept chewing on my brain.
Then a wonderful thing happened; big websites started dropping support for IE6 all over the place. 37signals, Gmail, and a few other sites I used regularly actually started killing off their support for IE6. I was utterly amazed, simply because it was like an answer from above and it coincided with my own plans to drop IE6 support the following year (2009). It was like a ray of light through the clouds for me and I began to get excited at the possibility of putting that browser behind me just like I did with Netscape Navigator 4 so many years ago.
For those of you who are reading this article while using IE6 it’s no surprise that I have simply provided IE6 with a bare-bones, unstyled version of the site. Why, you may ask? How dare I just leave some 15-20% of the Internet population looking at a plain-vanilla, black and white (and blue) version of my site? The reason is simple: content is king and design is ancillary.
If this site still works then why should I worry about whether or not a browser that is older than dirt doesn’t get something nice to look at? I did the same thing to Netscape Navigator 4 users years ago and I know I was not alone. In fact, during that time I was employed as a government contractor and the Federal Government had decided to use IE as their default web browser. I mean, it was 2001, for Pete’s sake.
The Blue Hag on my Back
The year 2001 seems like eons ago to me, and in Internet years it was something akin to a small ice age (8 years in August 2009). I clearly remember Jeffrey Zeldman’s article “To Hell with Bad Browsers” empowering me back then, helping me to push the limits of what CSS-enabled browsers could do at that time. It was like a dead weight had been lifted off of me. I was no longer shackled by the design choices for supporting a browser with no real CSS support. The newer versions of Netscape could even handle most of the stuff I threw at it. I was free to design again. Web design and development is hard enough without having to worry about one stupid browser just totally killing your carefully-crafted CSS.
But as time progressed I noticed that the weight was started to build up again; tension in the neck and shoulders, that dread and anxiety over viewing a project in a few certain browsers. It was that same old feeling again, only this time it was the dreaded Blue E.
I’m sure we all have horror stories related to IE, but needless to say it is time to move on and away from IE6. And as you may have noticed I let the point of this article kind of slip off on a momentary tangent, but really that is the point. I just did not have the free time to deal with IE6 issues on my own website. I was far too busy running my business and dealing with my client’s IE woes. So I guess I just bided my time until 2009. The official announcement from Microsoft puts the end-of-life for IE6 in 2010, but I had decided on my own to stop before then. I wanted to be free of IE6 by the time the official ax was dropped. (*update: support for IE6 has been extended to 2014; ask me if I care)
So while I am not totally satisfied with the current design here — and most designers are rarely, if ever, pleased with these kind of things — but I at least now have the proper setup. And since I no longer have to worry about IE6 I can realign things on this site more quickly than previously possible with the old site. Hurray for change!
- Posted in: News on March 23, 2009 @ 11:31 am
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