Adapting to web standards - Part 2

Last week I blogged about a very interesting book has recently hit the shelves of you local bookstore: Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites (Voices That Matter).One of the co-authors of this book is none other than AOL's own Kevin Lawver. This is the second part of the review of that book.

The second part of the book consists of two case studies: www.everythingtori.com and www.aol.com. Since this blog is all about AOL I'm just going to have a look at the second case study.

Chapter 7: AOL.com
A large chunk of this chapter is about the process of rebuilding and redesigning the AOL website from what it was before 2005 and what it is today. An extensive interview with Micheal Richman (technical lead and architect) and Kevin Luman (technology manager AOL.com) provides insight in how they setup their project and their team for succes. A great read!

Mark: Kevin, It looks like the team bonding was a big part of the succes of the AOL.com project. How was it for you to be part of this team and what exactly was your role?

Kevin: I was a consultant at the beginning of the project and throughout. I worked early on with the designers and product people to review designs, do performance estimates with David Artz and work on prototypes. I wasn't an actual implementer or part of the core team that built it. I spent a lot of time reviewing code with the team as they went through the early stages of implementation and gave them pointers and suggestions on how to make things faster, more accessible, etc. I don't have a day-to-day role on the aol.com team any more.

Then the chapter dives into 'Designing for Performance'. This is where developers and architects can pick up a number of useful tips and tricks that will help you design your website.

Tip: Just learning how the browser exactly goes about rendering pages and adjusting your markup to take advantage of this is a big part!

David Artz (teamlead AOL's Optimization team) is interviewed and offers his views and explains how AOL has a continuous process of keeping ahead of the competition in terms of performance.

Then lastly a look at CSS Best Practices shows (amongst other things) how the cool resizing is done. Just go to www.aol.com and change your browsers font size to see what I mean, awesome!

Mark: Kevin, I love the resize feature. Now I noticed not all subsites implement this, for instance news.aol.com does not resize the same way. In fact when looking at the markup of news.aol.com it would seem that not all best practices have been implemented. Is this what you're working on currently?

Kevin: AOL is a very large company and we have dozens of development teams. Not all of them are in the same place when it comes to web standards, and not all of them have the same goals. I currently work in the social platforms group on a lot of different social networking apps. We're obviously not done training everyone and encouraging standards-based best practices.

The case studies are fun to read and share what went on in real life projects. I'll repeat what I said last week, this book is a must read for anyone (developer, designer, architect or manager) building a serious web site or web portal.

Happy reading!

- Mark Blomsma