New website launched at last!

Today marked a real milestone - my first "accessible" and completely CSS-based web site went live. Such have been the delays that it's actually the fourth to go live, but the first one I created.

Of course, I've learnt so much since I did this that I'm sometimes embarrassed to look at it. Given what I know now I would probably approach it completely differently. The CSS itself is a bit of a mess, with unused experimental tags all over the place. I should tidy it up but it's complicated by the fact that I don't have Dreamweaver at work, and I can't access the site remotely from home due to "security" concerns. These same concerns have rendered impossible our strategy of using Contribute to enable team members to post to the site, which means one person (fortunately not me!) will be charged with adding content. This, of course, creates a bottleneck that led to the last site becoming dreadfully out of date.

But at the end of the day I am still quite proud of it - not a table in sight (except the calendar pages but that's a legitimate use of tables). Already the site is looking "different" from my intentions, which is what happens when you hand a project over. No matter how many guidelines you give on what should go where, over time they break down.

I think, if asked to do something similar in future, I would suggest using a blogging system like TypePad to develop it. I'm starting to think that team-based blogging is a sensible way to develop a text-heavy site that needs constant updating. In fact, I would quite like to work on something like that as an experiment...