2007 Web Standards Initiative Report Card Results
The Results
After launching this initiative back in January, I knew it was going to be an uphill battle for some design agencies to revamp their site while at the same time still handling all their normal workload. This project was meant to show the status of the adoption of Web Standards by local designers in the Pittsburgh region, and the results turned out to be not too great.
These are most definitely important results, but there are some circumstances that you cannot see from just plainly looking at this table. They are (in no particular order):
- It’s a snapshot in time – This is a validation snapshot of all designer homepages on June 28th, 2007. Some very well might have changed since then.
- Validation isn’t everything – Web Standards Validation is a very important aspect to designing for the web, but is by no means the only thing that one should use when choosing his or her new web designer.
- N/A CSS Validation – Don’t take this as a bad thing all the time. Some sites do not require CSS when they choose to use FLASH as a homepage. Other sites on the other hand didn’t use CSS when they definitely should of.
- Good Errors – When designing with CSS and HTML, there is a chance of correctly coding a site – only to have it not validate. An example would be the property opacity. It works fine, degrades well in older browsers – but still has not been adopted by the W3C as proper code. (FYI: There were only a few errors like this.)
- Members & Non-Members – Both are shown here because unfortunately, not all design agencies in Pittsburgh have taken our call to join… yet.
- Bonus Points – I originally decided to include a bonus field here where designer would get extra points for having a client site in it’s portfolio that validated. I have since then decided to not go into this detail because once a site is out of the designers’ hands… anything can happen. It just wasn’t a fair addition, so it was dropped from the results.
- Why should you care? Where do these “Yes” and “No” answers come from? – The 2007 Initiative spells it all out.
Member Local Designers
Non-Member Local Designers
| Company Name | Website | Valid CSS | Valid HTML |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ambience Interactive | View › | YES | NO |
| Amixa | View › | YES | NO |
| Catalyst Web Design | View › | YES | YES |
| Elliance, Inc. | View › | NO | NO |
| H2 | View › | N/A | NO |
| Kern and Co. Design | View › | NO | NO |
| Labwerks | View › | NO | NO |
| Nauticom | View › | YES | NO |
| New Perspective | View › | YES | NO |
| Novaurora.FG | View › | YES | NO |
| OnTV Pittsburgh | View › | NO | NO |
| Pipitone Group | View › | NO | NO |
| Pittsburgh Design Agency | View › | NO | NO |
| Pop Web Design | View › | YES | YES |
| Ripple Effects Interactive | View › | YES | NO |
| Spark Concepts | View › | N/A | NO |
| SunKING Digital | View › | YES | NO |
| Third-Wave Websites | View › | N/A | NO |
| Visionspin | View › | YES | YES |
| Web Cottage Designs | View › | YES | YES |
Special thanks to May 9’s Rant for this idea.