A much better path

I'm glad to see the new Adaptive Path site is online. It's truly a work of art, building on the previous design in innovative ways, making things much more clear and easy to find, while at the same time going totally standards compliant. The site is also loaded with dozens of cool tricks and hacks any CSS coder would faint over. My hat's off Doug for an amazing job.

Doug tells the tale of redoing the site and I should admit I was the guy that coded the previous version that I affectionately called "table and javascript hell" internally. Early last year was when I started doing full blown XHTML/CSS table-free sites, but no matter what I tried, the tricks and browser support for putting all those little funny blocks in odd places wasn't there yet. After a couple days experimenting, I gave up on CSS for layout and moved to nested tables.

The old design required dozens and dozens of images for almost every page, and was a royal pain to maintain (adding a new page meant new nav item images in several sizes, new title images, etc). Now, AP is a team of seasoned web veterans, but on more than one occasion changing the site required my intervention. AP's new site is a testament to the wonders of CSS. The markup is vastly simplified, making additions trivial and maintenance a breeze. It also works in almost any device, is much more accessible, and uses much less bandwidth making it cheaper to host and faster for users.

It's win-win, and I'm in awe at Doug's mad CSS skillz.