OpenIDHire Meyer
Congratulations to Eric Meyer on the launch of his new consultancy business, Complex Spiral Consulting (named after his famous css/edge demo). The new company’s tag line is “Helping clients improve the bottom line through the use of Web standards”, so it looks like the theme of standards advocacy is continued from his role at Netscape. Eric has also promised a series of occasional articles/tutorials, the first of which explains some useful techniques for using floats as part of CSS designs.
Fleeno Jackson - 27th August 2003 20:45 - #
Why would Eric not be able to build a business built on designing with standards?
Jeffrey Zeldman hits the nail on the head in his book Designing with Web Standards that no client will object to error-free, accessible sites that look good on multiple platforms and browsing tools, so selling clients on standards is not so much about the standards themselves but the benefits of having reduced costs for development and maintenance as well as compliance with accessibility laws that standards provide.
Eric Meyer is one of the marquee names when it comes to CSS and web standards. He's already worked with a number of companies consulting about standards as well as design, and now that he's on his own, there's no reason that his work flow should diminish. If anyone can make a go of it as a freelancer in today's web economy, it's Eric Meyer.
Tom Poston - 27th August 2003 21:12 - #
Actually, the new venture is NOT a standards-oriented design studio; I've said before and I'll say again that I'm not a strong visual designer. Complex Spiral Consulting about helping companies intelligently use standards to reduce costs and improve user experience, not to mention lower maintenance costs. The work I do will be concentrated on the back end, helping simplify templates and markup. If I get a client who wants a ground-up standards-based redesign, I'll take the job and partner with a savvy design firm to create the visual appearance.
For example, let's say ConHugeCo wants to reduce their bandwidth consumption and server costs. A perfect first step-- possibly the biggest one-- is to take their 60KB table-and-spacer page and convert it to a 20KB standards-oriented page. They can even keep the same visual design they had before... just have it in a much more efficient, far more accessible format.
Those aren't unreasonable reduction figures, by the way. I've been doing some standards-oriented conversions recently for a personal project, and all of them came in at roughly 50% the original markup weight, plus fewer images used, plus less need for scripts and browser detects. These aren't fanatical only-Mozilla-can-see-it conversions, either. The goal is to be standards-oriented. The markup validates, and it's simple. Some conversions use simple tables to frame the layout, and CSS to style the cell contents. Others don't use tables for any of the layout. The specific approach used depends on the situation.
Believe me, I'm at least as apprehensive as you are about the ability to pay a mortgage via a new consultancy! But so far things have gone well: two contracts with Macromedia, a training contract with Los Alamos National Laboratory, a couple of academic training gigs, and some other potential clients with whom I'm talking. I thought long and hard about taking this step, and so far the investment is paying off.
Eric - 27th August 2003 22:20 - #
I see no reason why Eric shouldn't be very successful in his new venture, I know of many people who do well providing similar solutions. The main difference however between him and many other people whom provide similar services is he already internationally renowned.
Robert Wellock - 28th August 2003 10:21 - #
christina - 21st July 2006 10:11 - #