Samaritan Project

31 December 05

Web samaritan work: good practice and portfolio filling material.

Converting the Web template of a popular site from tables to standards compliant design without being asked to do so is not new. Jeffrey Zeldman calls people who initiate this phenomenon The New Samaritans (2004), which is where I draw the label from. In that article, Zeldman points out that the concept goes back at least as far as 2001, when “J. David Eisenberg quickly reworked Yahoo! Weather to use CSS in place of cumbersome nested tables.” However, Doug Bowman is probably most famous for this activity when he presented a live conversion of Microsoft’s home site template during the Digital Design World 2004 conference in Seattle. He later published the great article Throwing Tables Out the Window about the experience.

In any case, samaritan or not, picking such a site and revamping its underlying template in the direction of proper standards is a good excercise that every designer could benefit from, whether for design practice, as an excuse to write a good article, or simply for the warm fuzzies.

I have been wanting to do one of these, just for kicks, and I have selected my target site, one that’s been on my mind for a while now. It’s work underway, but I won’t point out the site until I’ve got things wrapped up. My announcement will come in the form of a nice article like Bowman’s. The business metrics he uses in that article are great, and I’ll follow a similar course.