http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/css-sprites2-refactored-building-an-unobtrusive-jquery-plugin

Yes, I find it more and more easy to advocate standards based development to clients. (All thanks to a certain epiphany in 2003 via a certain Orange book I still refer to).

I often lead with your famous statement “99% of websites are obsolete” and then tell the prospective client that I’m not in the business of selling and developing products that are already out of date – that usually gets their attention!

Gone are the days of building sites to suit lazy developers – clients want predictable results and the best longevity they can get for their money. Most of the sites I work on are closely tailored to be search and Google PPC friendly – the results are that in 6 years of working this way has lead to many long-standing friendships with clients and not the typical agency hopping that tends to occur.

Just a quick question, I assume you were referring to Google PageRank and not Alexa?

Kind regards,
Lee

I work as a consulting SEO mostly – and find my role changing more to one of evanglising the semantic web than ever before.

That is interesting indeed! We come at the same truth from the other side. That is, we design with standards and get clients excited about it by pointing out the benefits to findability. (One of my favorite examples is of a client whose Alexa ranking rose from 6 to 7 within a week of our redesign of their site.)

Thanks for sharing, and the link to Dave’s article is now working. (I wrote this post while the issue was in preproduction and before the links were live.)

Looking forward to that link being fixed – but in the mean time – what a great unique and refreshing article on web design! We often think we’re doing things and building logical structures in an unprecendented fashion – we are pioneers and are paving the way, etc, etc … yet that article proves quite the opposite is the case.

I think a failure to see that there are greater forces at work than just the designer and client is what seems to lead to brand new sites being obsolete out of the box … I work as a consulting SEO mostly – and find my role changing more to one of evanglising the semantic web than ever before. Not a role I mind at all – just not something I saw coming 2 years ago.

In closing – thanks for linking that article – I might have missed it otherwise – and thanks to Aaron for the thought provoking read!

Regards,
Lee Stuttaford