I often get asked to look through existing websites to evaluate for new work. After taking a look through the site for things that might be mentioned in the brief or for quotation, etc. I will take a look at the source code which I will either be pleasantly surprised or presented with a DIV soup.
What I’m looking for is the level care and code base has been applied to the project, if it upto current standards (what ever they are) then you’re lucky but more often than not it looks a mess, full of tables for layout etc. The question is why, I do ask in person, but in these situations its often someone new has been put in charge or can’t remember when the site was first built etc.
So has the site been built six months ago and looks like a dogs dinner because the dev wasn’t any good, or was it built 10 years ago and that was the current standard for websites.
James Young pointed me in the direction of humans.txt – a place to keep any human readable text, so put in anything in there that is related to project, such as last modified, or a project start date – the team etc.
Could be quite useful to find out a back story of the site for better evaluation in future. Go check it out.
Just good housekeeping in the end
27 January 2012
On a recent project we were tasked with creating a web app for a presentation...
17 January 2012
I often get asked to look through existing websites to evaluate for new work. After...
14 November 2011
As web designers, UX designers or what ever we call ourselves these days, we have...