Following on from my post about accreditation for UK web designers, I decided to take a look around at some of the big name web design associations on the web with a view to getting their views and seeing if they would be interested in taking this forward.
I should explain at this point that I have heard of the Associations discussed before but had not, up till this point visited their web sites.
I have to say I was truly alarmed at what I found. Of the three sites I visited before giving up in horror, not one of them would be fit to be the public face of the sort of accreditation scheme I’d envisaged. Lets take them in the order I visited them.
First I went to the International Webmasters Association site.
Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? Yes
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.
Bad enough but the design. White text on a jet black background, a javascript driven image map as the sole source of navigation – and this was just the home page! Once inside it got marginally better, at least the main content was black text on a light background. However, any evidence of a style was totally missing.
Next please.
So I went to the International Association of Web Masters and Designers.
Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? Yes, but with warnings.
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.
This is terrible. Seriously. Just awful. It looks more like a big spammy affiliate site than an association for web professionals. They’ve even put a Javascript right-click ban on the site, although why they think anyone would be interested in stealing their source I cannot imagine.
Lastly I tried the British Web Design and Marketing Association. Surely we Brits would do the job right?
Does the markup validate? No.
Does the CSS validate? No.
Does the site pass an auto-validated WAI test? No.
Not only does it not do the job right, it is probably the worst of all 3 I could stand to look at. Squashed and haphazardly resized images, a terrible scatter-gun approach to layout and a bewildering yellow header scheme for the navigation that barely contrasted against the white links.
Its fair to say at this point that I was aghast. Each of these organisations have mission statements that claim to hold dear the pursuit of excellence and ethics in web design and are incredibly easy to find using very obvious keyphrases (‘web design news’, ‘web assocations’ are two examples) in a wide variety of engines. I’m very worried that these web sites are what the public see as the face of web design professionals.
Take any basic list of important things to consider when designing and building a web page and these three Associations have totally ignored it. Basic structure, colour theory, branding, usability, style, accessibility, CONTENT (unless you like endless offers of training courses), navigation – all missing.
I’m left with a sense of urgency that we as a profession need to do something about this. More than ever I’m convinced that the people who are best able to represent us are ourselves, not some Association that clearly doesn’t care about or doesn’t know how to represent us. How we start going about that is another matter. After seeing that little lot, I’m really hoping people out there have a lot of ideas.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Those are indeed absolutely dreadful websites, competing with each other only for the first prize in a Worst Site Ever-contest.
As for ideas, I would reckon that starting up Associations under similar names, run by a group of Standards-aware developers and designers (e.g. people like you and me), can better compete with these sites than (personal) weblogs can.
Having a W3C and a WHAT WG and whathaveyounot is not enough. “They” come in large numbers, and so must we. Start up 10 new `Associations for Web Standards Deployment`, link to each other, see a number of blogs link to you, and suddenly you’ll be pushing those sites like the ones above away from the first few pages of Google.
Strength in numbers. That’s what counts in the real world, that’s what counts in the digital world.
I hear you, there so much shite out there predenting to be decent content.
The UK Web Design Association is slightly better, Its horrible tables but it validates and is very clear, plenty of loverly whitespace.
http://www.ukwda.org/
@Tom: Well, I’m listed in UKWDA but its never done much for me traffic-wise. Again, its a boring site to look at but at least it works.
Nice to see someone else from Staffordshire in the blogosphere! 🙂
You know about the multipack yea?