Polymix
Polymix is a French plastics manufacturing company specializing in products for industry, medicine, science, and more. Polymix needed a Web site redesign, and the project was contracted to Addictif, a graphic design shop in Strasbourg, France. I happened to be involved by way of a short, voluntary internship with the Addictif agency (motivated by the need to practice my budding French language skills while getting an inside look at the design business in France).
The Polymix project was actually a three-way collaborative effort between Simon Sappa from Addictif (project management, graphics, and layout), a third-party handling PHP scripting (a partial, home-grown CMS solution), and myself (Web standards development).
My Work Specifically
By the time I was involved, the new design concept had already been negotiated. I suspected the concept had not been considered with Web standards in mind when I was handed the Photoshop mockups and asked if I could “make it look exactly like this?” My suspicians were confirmed when I looked at the specs and saw everything defined in pixels. I lobbied for reasonable changes that would work more effectively with browser differences, screen variables, and accessibility, but it was too late in the game. So for two weeks (my time allotment) I shoehorned all the standards and accessibility I could into the Photoshop plans as they were supposed to reflect online.
I fear I may have used a few more class selectors than necessary, but all-and-all templates and styles worked across all targeted browsers and validated fine at hand-over.
Follow Up: The new site went live a several weeks after my internship ended. Aside from the existence of the templates themselves, little remains of my original code. Many changes were seemingly made due to the third-party PHP added later. However, the elimination of my IE style sheets via conditional comments was surprising. CSS is now merged together in one big file (though the conditional filters still exist in the head of the templates). Unfortunately, none of the templates nor CSS pass W3C validation anymore.
Site link: polymix.fr
