Teaching an old webdog new tricks

I don’t know from personal experience whether you can teach an old dog new tricks, but I’m confident it is time again to reboot the Webdogs 2.0 franchise.

Yes, regular posts will resume shortly. But as part of a much larger web architecture rebuild already underway at all the Legal Services of Northern California websites, the Team Gizmo tech team at LSNC will use this site over the next several months to alpha- and beta- test a lot of those changes. We would rather blow things up here than do it at the several LSNC flagship sites. So, forgive us in advance if we try your patience.

Over the coming months, site changes we will be implementing include: a rebuild from scratch of the underlying structural markup to adopt a handful of HTML5 features that work reasonably effectively with current versions of Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari, and at least don’t break the design in Internet Explorer (with apologies in advance to those concerned, but we have never built anything to Opera specs); similarly, a rebuild from scratch also of the CSS, with light-handed adoption of some CSS3 selectors compatible with this same set of web browsers; adoption of a more flexible web design with a view towards making the site more usable and user friendly for mobile devices; greater attention to a core set of web accessibility design that meets a basic set of accessibility principles, to be discussed here; improvements to the Google custom site search functions, moving beyond the rudimentary iframe configuration in current use toward a more effective use of Google’s custom search API…

…and, of course, changes to the site aesthetics. Nothing dramatic, but the layout and presentation layer of the site will definitely be changing. This time, we are going to redo the site design publicly. Quite soon visitors to the site will see a totally stripped down site, without CSS, as we rebuild the markup. The site will look very bland if not downright ugly, something like my kitchen remodel.

It’s going to be ugly before it looks good again. But remember, beauty is only skin deep. It is the inner Webdog you love, right?