Using open standards lets the community redesign your site ;-)
David March 25th, 2008
A scary thought… letting anonymous users on the internet redesign the look of your web site. But the folks over at LibraryThing are doing that very thing. Well, almost. They are letting user submit proposed designs so that they can be reviewed by the internal development staff.
So far, some two dozen members have contributed CSS stylesheets and one, zanix, produced a highly original design, executed entirely in Photoshop. MarkBarnes, acting on a suggestion from Abby, produced a very attractive design, based on the design of Cork’d, “LibraryThing for wine.” All told, there have been some really interesting ideas, and fetching new color palates. I’m still not sure where to take the design, but it’s given me a lot to think about. (It’s certainly pointed out some structural problems with our mark-up too.)
I don’t know how many active users are over there, but they have collectively submitted over 25 million books to their collective virtual book shelves. This goes to show that when you have built the right kind of community for your site, you can get all kinds of feedback and contribution back to the community.
So what does this mean for you? If you take the time to design your web site from the ground up using standards based HTML and CSS (even if you just have a blog site), it will pay off many times over when you need to make minor changes to your design. All of the popular PHP open source projects have taken this to heart, making it easy to create themes associated with their products. (For example, there are literally hundreds of WordPress themes available to download for free use or purchase.)