The Technical Details
- At a glance
- This entry was written on November 7, 2005.
- The entry prior to this is entitled The Big Picture.
- The entry following this is entitled Getting it right.
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- This entry has been tagged as Blogs, Newspapers, Recommended, Work.
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I'd like to think that most people who design websites professionally or even semi-professionally would already know about web standards and their benefits.
Using valid HTML markup and separating presentation from structure and content through the use of CSS for styling and positioning makes pages smaller and generally more accessible to the blind (a segment of the population that a traditional newspaper can't even pretend to reach). Separating presentation from content also theoretically makes updates, tweaks and wholesale changes to a design much less labor-intensive and expensive.
Web standards are a Very Good Thing when it comes to the web as a whole, and you'd think they would be especially well-suited to a newspaper website.
Based on actual newspaper websites, however, you wouldn't be able to tell that. And newspaper websites should be the biggest supporters and users of web standards.
After all, they're content-heavy, high-traffic websites that would benefit the most from the bandwidth savings that come with a lean HTML-CSS, table-less mix of markup.
Instead, go to a newspaper website and view source and you get a face full of table markup and CMS sludge (a common error I keep seeing is two <head> tags in a document at a time). Some sites out there are further bloating their page sizes with <font> tags or inline styles.
I have yet to run across a newspaper website that uses valid HTML (90-percent don't even declare a doctype). A few are just encoded ampersands away from being valid, while others are filled with bad, buggy code that makes it a wonder that the pages load at all.
As newspaper circulations continue to spiral downward (with advertising rates and buys soon to follow), companies and publishers need to start thinking long and hard about the inevitable transition from a primarily print medium to a primarily digital medium. And that means making an effort to make the digital side of a newspaper—the website—a quality product ... before it becomes the only product.
I've already talked about the big-picture issues with newspaper websites—a lack of content, purpose or well-thought out advertising scheme being the thumbnail sketch. And as atrocious as those big picture issues are being handled, in my opinion, they are rivaled by the money being thrown away on poorly-built websites.
Using markup filled with spacer gif's and table tags does cost newspaper companies money ... and for no good reason. Close to any layout, and especially the generally simplistic layouts newspaper sites use, can be done using CSS for positioning (need proof?), resulting in smaller file sizes and significant bandwidth savings. In addition, junking the tables and designing a site with clean, semantic HTML is going to result in higher search results, and—assuming you keep your content online for more than a week—more page views (which means more advertising revenue).
The only reason for hanging on to these antiquated design methods I can think of is trying to make sure that the site remains accessible to readers using old, old browsers like Netscape 4.0. But newspaper web departments need to take a hard look at their server stats and decide if losing those readers (which I'm betting are a very, very small percentage of almost all newspaper sites and can easily upgrade to a more-compatible browser) would cost more money than they are throwing away on bloated markup.
Essentially, I'm willing to bet that catering to those 1-percent of readers is costing newspaper web sites a heck of a lot more money in bandwidth costs and site upkeep than they're worth in advertising views.
Internet publishing has such a low overhead already and newspaper websites can reduce this overhead by even more (and increase their internet profit) if they would just be smarter about the choices they make when it comes to the design and structure of the sites themselves.
These bad choices are are costing these companies money and are slowing the transition of newspaper resources from print to web—and not in a "Save the Newspaper!" sort of way, but in a "Hey, where'd everybody go?" sort of way.
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