VCC Design Studio

Introduction

VCC Design is the web page design studio for Ventura County Computers.

All web page design is about compromise. When designing web pages, there is a tendency to think of web pages as just electronic printed pages, but it simply isn't so. When you design a printed document, you know the exact size of the paper and you control the precise colors, brightness, fonts and graphics rendering. Web pages can be "printed" on huge monitors, regular monitors, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's), cell phones or even spoken to the vision-disabled.

Web pages should be designed primarily to be useful for all browsers and only then to be made picture-perfect for "standard" browsers. All the cell phone companies are having sales on Internet-capable phones for email and browsing. The days of writing web pages for standard sized screens is gone. Even if you are willing to forget about the currently small number of non-standard browsers out there, you are still making a mistake to dismiss them in design decisions today. You will be forced to redesign your site long before it should have become obsolete. With technology moving so rapidly, it doesn't make sense to deliberately exclude those who may well become a significant portion of viewers over the life of your site.

Amazingly, the majority of sites being built today will not display useful information on handhelds -- cell phones, PDA's and the like. Why? Inertia. It is easier to keep using what you know than to learn new ways of doing things. Unfortunately, inertia is a two-way street. It is easier to keep going, but inertia, trains and brick walls do not make for happy endings. If you don't like the thought of learning something new now, wait until you suddenly discover that handhelds won't work with your site -- and that overnight nearly everyone is using these new devices. It's going to happen. The only question is how soon.

Commitment

VCCDesign is committed to furthering the cause of standards-based design. We teach it at the html SIG we host for CIPCUGevery month, we write about in publications and on web pages and we create demonstration pages explaining it.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3) is the standards-setting international body. They maintain a web page validator that will check a page to verify that it is standards-compliant. It shouldn't be that difficult for web page designers to check their work to make sure it complies with international standards. Unfortunately, relatively few sites, even including the sites of major companies, can pass the simple test. This means their design is deliberately (or negligently) cutting off their site from huge numbers of potential viewers.