Wired is great print, but if the magazine can’t make money and is shuttered, taking the website down with it, I’m going to be livid. Not that making money online is easy—it’s not, especially without sacrificing your ethics and your voice—but if any mainstream outlet should be able to make the transition, it should be Wired.

I fear that may be impossible, not just for Wired but for all these old brands, because they can’t accept that the work at which they have excelled for years will be just as important when it’s online—and online only.

Reading though the comments provides an even more interesting story and a broader perspective. Comments by several former and current Wiredlings, including a few responses by Chris Anderson who passes blame to corporate (Conde Nast) decision-making. link

Not that there should be any fanfare around this. New Year’s and birthdays and anniversaries are just markers in time, milestones, giving us a chance to look back, remember the past, and plot how far we’ve come since then.

Not everyone liked the design. I read through a lot of criticism in the days and weeks following the launch. Some of the critics slammed our decision to support standards, claiming we “must be in bed with Microsoft“. Huh? Others chose to attack the visual design: “[Wired News] appears to be have been designed without benefit of a graphic artist…” Hmm, okay, guess I shouldn’t quit my night job then.

Reading through Eric Meyer’s interview with me on DevEdge is tough to do now. Seems like I knew so little back then. I was learning so fast, and was constantly discovering better methods, practices, and techniques. Immediately after the redesign, I wanted to go back and do it all over. To build it better. But I had to move on.

The original team that made that design a reality is long gone. Sadly, the current full-time editorial staff is stripped down to the bone. Glancing over the staff page, there’s not one employee with the title “Writer” or “Reporter”. And the list of contributing writers seems to be shrinking. Despite this, I’m happy to see Leander Kahney still faithfully churning out articles on Apple, Macs, and iPods, and blogging news and views in Cult of Mac.

We don’t point out validation errors on public redesigns anymore. We know a valid site is such a tiny part of any overall measure of success. Validation is something I only do on my own work now. That said, for a redesign that got so much attention for the jump into web standards and valid code, after three years of evolution and changes in staff, I was surprised to find only 7 validation errors on the front page (as of this writing). And those only consist of a missing type attribute on a <script> element, and several stray ampersands. Either means the existing team is still committed to doing things the right way. Or that the engineering team shaped and molded a solid content management system with rigid boundaries and enforcements.

Once every few months, I still get requests for the location of the original Wired News Design Documentation. Eric always told me I should expand it and publish it in a book. I never had the same confidence in it that he did.

Frankly, I’m surprised this design lasted as long as it has. Not many designs on the Web last for even two years. New technology arrives, methods change, marketing departments get itchy to create new messages, ad sizes change, designers like to rearrange the furniture. Somehow, it’s still there.

I’m glad this time marker didn’t completely slip by me unnoticed. It was an important milestone in my career. Soon after, I finally left Wired to dedicate my energy full-time to Stopdesign. Amazing that it’s been three years already. Yet that time period also feels like it was so long ago. Remember what was happening in your world three years ago?

We’ve learned so much in the last three years. But have we really even begun yet? With all this new potential in front of us, I think we have so much more to uncover.

Digital Web Magazine just posted another interview for their latest issue, this time, the questions from Craig Saila were directed at me. Read all about why I wrote off CSS as a failed pipedream for so long, what I think about the Wired News design more than a year after our launch, and my sentiments about the end of Webmonkey.

One of the major players in the Wired News redesign was Aaron Jones, the Senior Engineer with whom I collaborated to make the redesign a reality. A few weeks ago, Macromedia requested an interview with both of us to discuss the Wired News redesign and our highly publicized leap into the world of CSS. Knowing the strong efforts Macromedia has been making with Dreamweaver’s support for CSS, we graciously agreed. One Thursday afternoon, I met Aaron and the Macromedia team at the Wired office, where a crew set up lots of lights, cameras, and microphones, took over an hour of audio, condensed it down into a concise three-minute micro-interview, and laid down the audio track into a Flash file, matching it with video stills, screenshots, code snippets, and supporting imagery.

They posted the result as a special feature, CSS and Wired.com, in the Dreamweaver section at Macromedia.com. This interview fits into a broader campaign promoting Dreamweaver and its CSS support. About half of the current page views of the Macromedia home page feature a prominent flash file promoting the special feature. In conjunction with the audio interview — and on the same page — Macromedia also published a set of tips I wrote for them related to design and CSS, and the relationship between the two.

As a side note, we had originally scheduled interview a week before it was actually conducted. I had come down with a bad cold, and felt miserable that day, so we postponed until the following week. I thought most of the cold was gone by the time the second scheduled date came around. But sure enough, within about 10 minutes of the interview, I lost my voice, and starting coughing like crazy. Since I was wired up with a mic, someone else ran to get water, tea, and any available cough and throat drops. Thanks to someone who found a bag of Ricola, I was able to scrape by for the rest of the interview. I’m glad Aaron was there to handle half of the discussion. It’s amazing Macromedia actually had enough material to use after stripping out all my raspy attempts at answering their questions, even for a three-minute audio file.

Three months after starting the low-paying job, I was depressed, out of money, missed my friends in San Diego, and was convinced I had made the wrong move. I gave notice, told my landlord I was moving out, and arranged to go back to my old job at a design agency in San Diego. Two days before I was to leave HotWired, Jonathan Louie (Design Director at the time) convinced me otherwise, offering me a new position and my first promotion of many more to come. I stayed, and lost a girlfriend in San Diego as a result.

Fast-forward to the present…

In two days, it will have been 9 months since I left Wired to go out on my own. Friends who know the journey and my initial intimidation of taking the job at HotWired say to me, “…and look where you are now.”

Terra Lycos ran a CSS design contest open to US residents only. I complained on [mezzoblue.com] and linked the contest. An employee found the link and e-mailed me, telling me I should enter, but obviously didn’t bother reading that I was Canadian and therefore ineligible. I responded. They told me to enter through a US citizen. I did.

Dave won, and is now being informed that original rules still apply: he is not eligible to win any part of the contest because he is Canadian. Even though Dave was targeted with an open invitation to enter by one of the contest organizers (Lincoln Jackson), and assured ahead of time by Lincoln that it would be ok to enter through a U.S. resident. If Lycos needs to be a stickler on a technicality which Lincoln did not thoroughly research and clear with Lycos Legal, then I say it’s on Lincoln’s head to act with integrity and rectify the situation. Either by convincing Lycos to pony up. Or with his own wallet.

The building HotWired started leasing in 1996 was more than a cool place to work. Wide, open quadrants in a four-story SOMA warehouse, tall ceilings, exposed beams and columns, brick walls, massive skylights, industrial-grade steel staircases connecting each floor, conference rooms with brightly painted doors and walls to distinguish each from the others. Of course, with Wired roots, when any surface was painted, it was usually coated with the brightest fluorescent color money could buy. Our desks were simple doors on sawhorses. Pens and paper were hard to find in an office which embraced electronic publishing and resource conservation.

In the early days, the cool factor of working in the office stemmed from the tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm which permeated each floor. Experimentation was a way of life. Ideas flourished. HotWired was high on personality, creativity, and innovation. And very low on rules, process, and corporate cheerleading that plagued so many successive dot-coms several years later.

In latter years of my career at Wired, the office space slid downward in its desirability and enjoyment factors. The bright colors were still present, but didn’t seem as uplifting and edgy as they once did. The open design and casual atmosphere still greeted every person who walked in. But the feeling of emptiness in the space grew continually as a result of accelerated attrition and disgust with the corporate cheerleading introduced by our new parent company, Lycos. Multiple rounds of layoffs dealt continued blows to office morale. Shrinking budgets taught us those once-filled positions had permanently vanished, incapable of being replaced by anyone from the growing community of our nation’s job-seekers.

Though the joy of working in the office dropped considerably, it didn’t entirely cease to exist. The number of people working there had been steadily declining. But there were still interesting, incredibly smart, talented people coming into the San Francisco office on a regular basis. Working directly alongside each of them on various projects was always rewarding and inspiring.

Working in any office is not just about the environment, or the design of the chair one sits in (though physical factors can certainly make the office a more comfortable and enjoyable place to spend multiple hours of the day.) It’s also about the people with whom one gets to work. Good people make suboptimal work places more bearable, and possibly even pleasurable.

When I relaunched Stopdesign as a business late last year, out of practicality, I began working out of my apartment. Not long after leaving Wired, I started missing the energy from working and being around people all day long. I found myself constantly itching to get outside my apartment to work. I like quiet time alone as much as any person. But being so extremely independent was too much for me. I started going to cafes and public spaces to work, just to be around other people. I sought out comfortable spots in the city with open wifi and an array of food so I could camp out for hours at a time. Carry a small laptop, a power adapter, a mouse, and a phone, and you’ve got a mobile office that can go anywhere. That’s just what I did as I started out.

Fortunately for me, a close connection with the fine folks at Adaptive Path yielded an opportunity to pick up office space downtown. Well, it’s more like “desk space”. But it provides a means to help keep work somewhat separated from personal life. And it’s awesome. Not only is it located in the heart of downtown San Francisco with convenient access to public transportation and a multitude of shops and restaurants. [Ack, this sounds like an ad for an apartment.] Sharing office space with the partners of AP is a great experience. Good people. Their areas of expertise complement mine. And, of course, they know how to appreciate good design. So we get along well. Sometimes the office is bustling with people and energy. Other times it’s quiet and peaceful with just one or two people present. A nice mix keeps it interesting.

Having office space again… well, let’s just say I’m enjoying it.

Note: Wired News content is accessible to all versions of every browser. However, this browser may not support basic Web standards, preventing the display of our site’s design details. We support the mission of the Web Standards Project in the campaign encouraging users to upgrade their browsers. (Read More)

This upgrade message is normally hidden in browsers which support the CSS method of doing so. The message wording is a sensitive issue for which Wired was getting a lot of flack while I was still there. Even though Wired uses a class to hide this message via CSS, all Wired’s CSS files and images are hosted on Akamai. Akamai.net is a domain often blocked by spyware and ad-blocking software, preventing the CSS files from loading. Pulling in content from external domains may also be prohibited by certain security software. So some perfectly standards-compliant browsers (run alongside said software) were still seeing the upgrade message, and in tandem, the unstyled version of the site.

Wired can’t solve every unique problem. But they can change their message about the problem. To get around this issue of the message being incorrect, right before I left, I suggested changing the wording of the message to something like the following:

Note: Wired News pages rely heavily on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for many visual design details. This browser may not support CSS adequately enough, stylesheets may be disabled or blocked, or necessary files may not be loading correctly. Read more.

This newer version shortens the message and increases the percentage of cases where it’s completely correct. It states the CSS usage is for the visual stuff, allowing those who don’t need or care for those details to ignore the message. It also pushes the burden of presenting the browser upgrade push to the last line of the linked explanation page, (Read More) where the relevancy adds more punch:

If you’d like to ensure Wired News is displayed as we’ve intended it to look, we encourage you to visit the Browser Upgrade Campaign page from the Web Standards Project to learn how and why you should upgrade your browser.

As for the location of the original message itself, I chose to show it at the top of the page on the front door only — attempting to avoid the repetition Richard mentions when visiting successive pages of the site. Click through to any of the inside pages of Wired News, and the message moves to the footer. At some point, this message must reach a saturation point, and could probably be moved into the footer on the front door as well. But I’m not sure when that threshold gets crossed.

As Richard correctly mentions in his post, I decided any version of the upgrade message was inappropriate and unnecessary on Stopdesign. Some browser versions may display a less-styled design than others, (e.g., in Netscape 4.x). But I’ve tried sticking to properly structured markup alongside a complementary low-end stylesheet, creating subtle text-rendering details in those browsers. So I don’t mind the appearance of this site sans-stylesheet.

Another project I had a hand in design directing and pushing to XHTML/CSS (smack in the middle of the Wired News redesign) finally surfaces. Following Wired’s lead, HotBot redesigns and in the process, completely morphs as a new product. [Mostly] table-less CSS-based design that was cranked out in a one-week visit to Boston back in June. The backend took significantly longer, thus the delay. The CSS changed slightly from what I originally authored, creating a few rendering and alignment bugs in various browsers. But you get the basic idea. Aside from very minor visual changes, the design we came up with is still in tact, and represents the harnessed power and attitude HotBot has been known for.

They still have a few validation problems due to improperly used elements and attributes. They’re working on those. If they must keep the <iframe> at the bottom of the source code, they’ll have to switch the Doctype to XHTML Frameset or Transitional. But the <layer> tag in the same spot will have to go. I think they have a way to go to refine some of the features — both in concept and execution.

New Features

The new HotBot team should be commended for taking the leap, pushing search to the next level, and making a last-ditch effort to put this search engine back on the map. They have their own page which summarizes some of the new features. In my own words, here’s what I think is cool:

• Speed – The main search page has been optimized, and is now wicked fast. They tell me they dropped the download time from 4.5 seconds down to 1.5 seconds. For a search engine, that’s one to harp on.
• Multiple catalogs – Choose the source of your results, including Google, Inktomi, FAST, and Teoma. Want someone else’s results for the same query? Click a different radio button and they change instantly.
• Design control – The design and color scheme is customizeable via pre-configured CSS “skins”. It can also be customized through a WYSIWYG style picker, or completely customized personal CSS files, similar to what AlltheWeb recently began offering. Don’t like what they give you? Change it.
• Filters – Frequently used advanced filters can still be added to the front page. When not used, they can be minimized to display simple text summaries of the current settings.
• No ads – They even took a bold step and removed the ads from the front page to eliminate clutter and make the page that much faster. An excellent decision that benefits the user experience tenfold. (Let’s see how long this lasts — hopefully a long while.)
• Even though I can’t say what they are, they have even more features in the pipeline, so keep an eye out.

Some History

The Lycos search team in Boston took over management and engineering behind the HotBot product a little more than two years ago. Those of us remaining at Wired cringed as we watched them suck the technology out of HotBot and hang it out to dry. Renewed interest in the smaller “Indie Brands” at Lycos this past year finally brought welcomed attention (and resources) back to sites like Wired News and HotBot.

Midway through this year, the search designer was desperately struggling through some confused attempts at revamping the HotBot design and brand. She was entirely unfamiliar with the Wired and HotBot aesthetic, and the goals the original HotBot team kept in mind for each prior iteration of the search engine. I flew back to Boston to provide some needed direction and reign in the creative thinking. Two of us locked ourselves in a small conference room. In the span of about four days, the live design you see is pretty much the result we came up with.

At the time, I was halfway through the Wired News redesign, and knee-deep in CSS. For my money, HotBot was the next logical product to follow suit. My encouragement for HotBot going all XHTML/CSS was initially met with a lot of resistance. Much more hesitation than I was getting for the Wired News design. But a simple design proof-of-concept mocked up that week using all CSS (which looks remarkably similar to what they’ve launched) started turning the team on to the possibilities. The Wired News redesign launch in October sealed the deal.

The “Classic” skin roughly shows the design we started with. In my opinion, they should have kept it as the default skin. But a few rounds of user testing held product management back from the bolder background color choices in Classic. Thus, the [current] default skin was created as a compromise. Half-sized screenshots of the unmuddled [validating] version of the original design are now available in the Websites section of my portfolio.

Questions

As a product, does it make sense? Is there a reason to use a search engine that seems to be a copy of the failed metacrawlers from several years ago? Why not just go straight to the results providers themselves? Why not at least make HotBot the smart aggregator of results so that it chooses the right combination of providers for you? Is there a benefit to the changeable skins for a search engine? Could it be harmful to the brand? These were all questions I asked when I arrived on the scene. Some I got answers to. Some I didn’t. Some I’m still asking myself, and for HotBot’s sake, I hope the product managers are too.

Jumping back in time, I remember picking up an interest in bulletin boards in ’92 while I was still in college. I started at a marketing design firm named Mentus as an intern during my senior year. In my spare time, I spent countless hours exploring the concept of connected computers and online content using the company’s AOL account. Of course, with a 14.4Kbps WinFax modem, the majority of my time was spent waiting for the next screen to load.

At the time, the president of Mentus knew nothing about the Web, and believed it was a trend that would go away within a few years. He didn’t think it fair to charge our clients for Web design work. Any Web-related project was considered a “value-add” to their print projects, and was basically offered as pro bono work. (amazing, eh?) Since I had the least seniority as a designer, (and thus, probably the lowest salary) and a strong interest in the Net phenomenon, I was always given these pro bono projects. I gladly accepted them with a hunger to learn more. I was proud that I had taught myself the ins and outs of HTML. Eventually, I was teaching our production staff how to take financial numbers from the annual reports we designed, and place them into HTML tables.

In August of 1996, I packed up and left everyone and everything I knew in San Diego. A girlfriend, college buddies, professional contacts, and a rapidly blooming career as a print designer. I’d been following Wired magazine several years prior, and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to move to San Francisco and join this relatively new online experiment called HotWired. I took the job with intentions of staying one solid year to see how it went. Little did I know what lied ahead.

I knew nothing about the Web then, relatively speaking. I knew the difference between a gif and a jpeg, how to center text on a page, construct a table, and had just been introduced to an incredible new browser from Netscape Communications. The Web was still young then. My friends and family didn’t understand what I was doing, online advertising didn’t exist, and “dot com” as a common phrase hadn’t even surfaced yet. HotWired was young, fun, courageous, inventive, and creative. If someone had an idea for a new content channel, we put together a team and launched it without hesitation. It was a playground for adults, and we were paid to play.

Fast-forward to the present. My, how things have changed. My tenure at this company has been filled with so many interesting events, people, and changes, I could write a book and still not cover everything. I firmly believe that 6 internet years is just as long, if not longer, than the equivalent in dog years. This hasn’t been one company — it’s been multiple companies, ever-changing. We’ve been the acquiree in two major acquisitions. We’ve transitioned from a small online experiment of Wired magazine to a huge international presence with multiple brands spread across the Web.

After several years of a love-hate relationship with Lycos and Terra, infinite title changes, multiple trips to Boston and Madrid, and many debates within myself, I’ve decided now is the time to gracefully walk away. I feel incredibly privileged to wrap up my career here with the redesign of Wired News. A swan song which dots the “i”, crosses the “t”, and places a huge exclamation mark at then end of a wonderful stint with the most talented, inspiring group of people I’ve ever worked with.

But this isn’t the end. I leave Wired with an unbridled excitement of going out on my own and starting a new business. The very one you see before you. Stopdesign is Douglas Bowman (for now). Designing, writing, speaking, coding, teaching, solving problems one at a time. Applying everything I’ve learned and experienced. Some say I’m crazy to jump into a still-depressed market, but others see and share my excitement and passion for what I’m about to undertake, and have no doubts. I’m young and eager, and can feel energy pumping into my veins just thinking about what’s ahead. If I fall to the ground in attempt to spread my wings, no big deal — I can pick up and start over with something else.

I woke up around 6am this morning to witness one of the most beautiful sunrises over the city of San Francisco I think I’ve ever witnessed. The sky lit up with the most powerful oranges, reds, and yellows I’ve ever seen, and they were all reflected in the waters of the San Francisco Bay below. What a great reminder that this is not an end at all. It’s only the beginning of the next exciting chapter filled with unknown potential. Join me on the journey.

(Translated into: Japanese)

As I referenced the other day, we’ve been getting a lots of feedback about the redesign, some negative, some positive. My address is included in several of the feedback alias lists, and I try to read the majority of feedback, despite that it’s often buried among 400-500 messages per day of spam.

Many of the negative messages are polluted with poorly written subjective messages filled with angry words, or claims that immediately reveal their own misinformation. (One user actually reported that our site looked like s*** in his browser, and looked worse when he upgraded to Netscape 5. ?!) However, nested among those messages, I started to see recurring themes and similarities with specific “dislikes” or features which supposedly made our site unusable.

One of those themes centered around my choice of a certain gray color for text appearing on black backgrounds. I started seeing quite a few comments (all phrased colorfully) about the text being way too dark to be legible. When designing and choosing colors for the Web, one of the first lessons a designer learns is that color can change drastically from one monitor to another. Look at a site on a designer’s 18-inch Sony flatscreen, then walk over and look at the same site on a Unix admin’s Viewsonic, and you’ll usually see a big difference in hue, value, and contrast, even if they’re both set at the same resolution and color depth.

After realizing I may have assumed wrongly that the gray I chose would be legible enough on all monitors, I decided to adjust the text color to a lighter value of gray or even white. This screen shot [.gif, 37 KB] shows the original on the left, the new on the right. What did this require? I made five tiny changes to the WN stylesheets, which took approximately 60 seconds. When the site content flushed (updated) at 2am a couple nights ago, my text color changes were immediately propagated to hundreds of pages that used a black background. The developers didn’t have to lift a finger.

Is that my point? Well, not entirely. It’s incredibly cool. And it’s immediately understandable if you’ve been working with — our understand the value of — using CSS for styling and designing Web pages. This was a tiny change with very little noticeable impact on the interface. But the point of this whole post boils down to one immediately effective result: Not one message has been written in the last two days that even hints at problems with the gray text color issue.

As writers and editors find articles and other online documents to reference for their stories, they often copy and paste the URL from a browser window into our CMS. Do that six or seven times for an article, and it’s easy to miss one of the sly little ampersands hiding toward the end of a long URL. Most writers and developers would never assume such a simple symbol could cause such a troublesome recurring validation error. To be fair, the occurrence of a naked ampersand produces no rendering problems in current browsers, nor prohibits locating a Web document correctly if used in a URL. The majority of browsers ignore incorrect use, allowing the error to escape notice. Thus, proper use of ampersands in today’s pages is merely futureproofing, ensuring compatibility with the stricter XML-based browsers of tomorrow.

Somehow, we have to avoid the constant manual check of pages and retroactive fixes of existing errors. This method is unreliable and time consuming. I’m sure the engineers will be making modifications to our content insertion tool, so that validation errors like naked ampersands can be automatically detected and corrected as they’re entered.

The negative feedback continues to slide in. But now, the negativity is drowned out by an overwhelming positive response from the blogging community and loyal users who have taken the time to write in or make log entries sharing their perspectives, praise, gratitude and encouragement. I’ve been at HotWired for six years now, and the flaming negative hate messages which spew our way after a new redesign are not new for me. Wired/HotWired design has always been controversial — some people love the daring bright-colored attitude, some people hate it. I haven’t come across too many people who fall in the middle.

What’s interesting about the negative feedback is that, aside from the aesthetic — which is always subjective — none of the feedback is consistent. One user wants one thing, another user wants it the exact opposite. As designers, we make conscious decisions to use elements from a visual language to communicate a message or facilitate interaction. With Wired News I decided to keep, and even emphasize, the strong aesthetic of our roots. Readers who have been with us for a while understand our design history.

Love it or hate it, this is the Wired aesthetic. We’ve pushed and evolved that aesthetic over the years. However, this redesign revives a lot of the classic motifs, color schemes, and bold design elements that pushed readers into the love/hate relationship in the mid ’90s. The story of the Digital Revolution may have shriveled up into a corner, but technology continues to impact our lives in profound ways. Now, we’re just living out that impact.

“… the really important stuff all happened behind the scenes. Using no tables to lay out the page, but instead applying CSS to XHTML, the site is a stunning example of how standards can be made to work today.”

Wow, even as I write this, an engineer just yelled across the room that that article about the redesign is currently the number one topic on BlogDex, and rapidly climbing on Daypop (both index thousands of weblogs and report back the most popular topics of the day). Hail to the bloggers of the world — they actually get it because they’ve been doing it.

“As a highly visible site with a long (and well-earned) reputation for deploying web technology well, Wired serves as a beacon to all developers. Its XHTML/CSS redesign will inspire other commercial sites to take the plunge…”

“…That’s how progress works. Indies take risks. Large, commercial sites take risks. Sooner or later, the market follows these leaders. The bigger the leader, the greater the impact, and the sooner what were once risks become norms. When your client, boss, or manager says, ‘We can’t do this,’ you can now reply, ‘Wired did it.‘”

After reading through Zeldman’s post, a congratulatory email from him dropped into my inbox. In addition to informing me of the Daily Report post I had just read, he also pointed out a new entry over at the Web Standards Project, referring to the redesign as a “Gutsy move for such a high-traffic site.” Jeffrey correctly reported that our site doesn’t validate [yet -- I add -- we're working on that right now], but is quick to point out that validation is not the end-all, be-all.

While I completely agree with him, and am very proud of our accomplishment so far, we didn’t come all this way to let 13 stupid errors stand in our way of a perfectly valid XHTML document. Keep checking that validator url. Our team is hunting down and knocking off the errors as I type. It can be done. We know it can!

Why is this significant? Why should anyone care? Why did we fight to get a press release issued by our parent company just to cover a redesign of a technology news site? While the design on the surface may look different, admittedly, we haven’t added many new features. So what’s the big deal?

Take one of the Web’s longest-running daily content-producing sites which gets millions of pageviews, redesign the site with a noticeable facelift, convert the markup of thousands of pages to follow strict XHTML 1.0 rules, make those pages rely entirely on CSS for every design, format, and presentation detail, and don’t look back. Our Executive Editor, Jon Rochmis wrote an article about the redesign, Wired News: A Site for Your Eyes. I took a slightly more technical approach with my explanation: Behind the Wired News Redesign.

We believe this is a huge deal, and a significant event in the development and evolution of the Web. Wired News is not the first website to make this leap. But it remains a highly visible beacon among the influential techno-savvy creators, inventors, and developers who are building and shaping the Web. It’s our hope that Wired News can be a powerful example of the what can be achieved when following W3C endorsed standards. Articles and documentation discussing the nuts and bolts of the redesign will be posted on this site soon.

Bummer! We’ll get it up soon though.