WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

The brief
Building a website compliant with Web Standards for a
record company is a challenge. For years, Flash has been
the essential tool for band websites. Plus, there are
unfathomable navigation challenges, jukebox widgets,
frames, questionable color palettes, and the ever-present
Loading bar. While much of the Web looks current, in the
music industry, it is still 1999. The situation is getting better,
as Dan Rubin will illustrate in Chapter 2 of this book,
but good sites are still few and far between.
For the Dirty Pretty Things website (www.dirtyprettythingsband.com),
I and my fellow designers at Agenzia
had the opportunity to build on the impact we had made
with the relaunched Libertines (www.thelibertines.
org.uk) site in the summer of 2004 (see Figure 1-1). We
built the Libertines site with Web Standards, using Flash
elements in a responsible way. We were hell-bent on
keeping content separate from presentation to capitalize
on the growing number of users accessing the site
through mobile devices, and to ensure longevity for the
core content, regardless of future redesigns. As it happens,
the great hopes of UK rock and roll disbanded
amidst a maelstrom of excess and bad behavior, but the
site lives on with an ever-growing community of users.
Fast-forward 18 months, and Libertines cofounder Carl
Barat has formed a new band, and there is major anticipation
from the music press and fans alike. With celebrity
ex-Libertine Pete Doherty all over the tabloids for all the
wrong reasons, it is up to Carl and company to bring joy
back to the thousands of fans who sold their souls to the
Libertines. From the outset, it is clear that any new website
is going to be on the popular side, and armed with
our experiences from the Libertines site, it is easy to convince
the record company that Web Standards are the
only way forward.
A mass of original artwork created for the band by Hannah
Bays is thrown our way, and although distinctive and
cool, none of it seems to lend itself to a web design. In
fact, getting a design together becomes a long and
drawn-out process, and is put on the back burner while
we begin building the core content of the site using just
XHTML and PHP/MySQL.
Figure 1-1. The final version of the Libertines website
(www.thelibertines.org.uk)
This chapter will join the process as we complete the
XHTML and database and return to the presentational
approaches, looking at how this was achieved with a separate
layer using CSS. The focus will be on applying the
presentational visual touches, such as custom backgrounds,
headers, and other widgets with CSS, leaving the
core content uncompromised. Figure 1-2 shows the final
version of the website.
chapter 1 Semantic Structure, Dirty Pretty Presentation
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