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Behind The Firm List Blog
Making My Life Website Compliant
Spent a moment trying to think which should come first, an article about balancing my life or balancing this site? Well, if
you've been reading this, you'll notice the life part came first, as it should.
While I've been working on making my life standards compliant, I have also been doing the same for The Firm List.
I've been working, working, working for what, 6 years now, to make this site better and better. I'm still doing that.
Perhaps the site is good enough as it is, but I don't work on this site to reach some lowest common denominator or
whatever, I run this site to learn and grow. And because of that, there's no use for stopping at any one point and
allowing the site to just pay for itself, or whatever. If I'm not tinkering, then I'm not learning. And there's always
so much to be tinkered with and learnt.
Related to a day-job project, I started doing some research and thought on search engine placement, etc. That of course
led to a lot of fiddling, experiment and further thoughts. What started with trying to change some of the page
structure to get my pages higher in Google led to me thinking about how to do that and enhance the experience, rather than
just move up in the rankings.
Making your site easier to find does enhance the experience, don't get me wrong. But once they come, does it work.
And additionally, to make the site work at the level it's at (or higher), what does it take for me to run/maintain
the site.
All of that rolls around in my brain (and still does) and I tinker. Arkansas has been my testing ground on this one
(and now Kansas as well). I haven't finished tinkering, but I am well along the path to the next "iteration" of
The Firm List experience.
Along the way, I've looked into making the site standards compliant, of shifting from old-style HTML to new-style.
I've been meaning to all along, and now I am starting to move over to XHTML and CSS in a big way.
Much of the motivation behind it is purely to "meet the goal." XHTML transitional compliance in and of itself doesn't
do much for you or me, but it does show I know how to do it and that it can be done. Inevitabily it gets applied to
my day jobs. And ultimately it will pan out in ways I haven't imagined (that's the nature of this whole site.
So, eventually, it will pay off. I can already see it. It will allow me to make even more wide-reaching changes
and upgrades to the site in an easier manner. And that will be good. For me and for you.
Happily compliant. Much better than "Happily Complacent."
