This morning’s post by Seth Godin (Where are the tweakers) asks an interesting question of why there are no companies or services that take existing websites and “tweak” them to make them a little better.  After personally building over 350 websites in the past 15 years, I can very comfortably say why I don’t take on this task.  The art of fiddling with a site is hard enough when the code is what you developed on your own.  When faced with fiddling with other people’s (mostly garbage) code, the task becomes daunting.  It’s usually easier to chuck the whole mess and rebuild from scratch … even if the look and feel of the site remains the same.

However, there is hope on the horizon.  Lead by pioneers like Jeffrey Zeldman, there has been a movement for quite a while to move website design to a “Standards Based” (W3C Complient) system of completely separating aesthetics and form with content.  To see how miraculous this can be, visit www.CSSZenGarden.com.  In the right had column of the default page, there’s a list of other designs, click on them to see what happens to the look and feel of the site.  Understand that ALL of these designs are using the same content … in fact, the exact same HTML page!  The only thing that’s required to modify the look and feel is to point to a different style sheet.

So, how would this help in Seth’s quest to have control over tweaking and A-B testing??  I’m thinking the results would go …. sorry about this folks …. TO THE MOON!  (groan)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 6:52 am and is filed under Idea Mashing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.