When my company’s website is brought up in discussion, I’m quick to spout the cliche about the cobbler who has no time to sew proper shoes for his own children. We’re entirely too busy with our clients to tend to our own website, and it’s been that way for way too long. One thing that’s been bugging me since the current design was launched not quite 2 years ago was using table tags for layout. It’s not exactly good accessibility. So we’re finally getting on with making our website compliant with web standards. You can view a sneak peek of our new standards-compliant template here. It’s not quite finished yet, but if you look at the HTML Source, you’ll see that code really can be poetry. Our developer reckons it’s the most semantic, most lightweight, most excellent code he’s ever written. And I agree. It’s a thing to behold! Have a look at the Source for yourself. As you’ll see, code bloat has been completely minimized. The body copy is above the header nav in the HTML, which is great for SEO as it gives more keyword prominence to the main page content. And it’ll degrade nicely too on text browsers like Lynx, screen readers for the blind, and handheld devices. Now we just need to find the time to implement this new layout across our site! As soon as we finish our upgrade of the website’s CMS, I’m told. I can’t wait!