Fast Company picks up speed

In the continuing trend of large sites converting to web standards and CSS-based layouts, Fast Company finds the religion and adopts it as their own. FC relaunched their site today, giving up reliance on tables for layout. Instead, they turn to lean XHTML markup combined with the power and flexibility of CSS. File sizes of various pages were cut in half and speed up the site dramatically. New features make improvements to the site’s accessibility. Color schemes can be changed each month with little more than the flip of a switch. FC details some of the new features in a revised Site Guide.

When we launched Wired News five months ago, it felt like we were jumping off a huge cliff, not knowing for sure what would happen to development costs, traffic, and revenue. As more commercial sites realize and demonstrate the benefits of moving to web standards, the leap of faith other sites will need to make gets smaller and smaller. When sites like ESPN — with 40 million page views per day — make the conversion and can talk about mind-boggling numbers of bandwidth savings, what was once a leap of faith eventually shifts to pure business logic.

So hats off to Daigo Fujiwara, Dan Cederholm, and the rest of the Fast Company web team. Not only have they joined ranks with other leading sites who have made the leap. But they also charge out of the gates on their first day with completely valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup.