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Katzenbach & Company

Westport, Massachusetts
Katzenbach and Company Web site

Project Details

  • Company: Katzenbach & Company Real Estate
  • Industry: Real estate
  • Responsibilities: Design, XHTML and CSS templates, Flash
  • Launched: May, 2008
  • View This Project: www.katzenbachandcompany.com

Project Summary

CSS? What's that? You use it to layout Web pages and provide visual style? I thought that’s what tables and inline images were for?

That was my understanding prior to taking on the project for Katzenbach & Company through The Computer Doctors. I was actually originally hired only to do the design and Flash work for this project while another team was slated to do the page builds using CSS for layout. Having spent a number of years working almost solely on kiosk interfaces, and not much in terms of Web sites, I was out of touch with the whole ‘Web standards’ concept (this was in late 2007), so this whole 'tableless design' approach was new territory for me.

Before I even completed the design for this new site, the team that was slated to build the pages was off the project and I took it upon myself to learn how to build this site using CSS instead of tables. That decision set me off on what would be one of the most rewarding paths I have yet to take in my 10 years working as a designer. Learning about Web standards, CSS and semantic markup really lit a fire under me and got me excited about designing for the Web – and within a year after launching this site, I had moved on from my job working on kiosk user interfaces (where I had been for just about 6 years) and onto designing for the Web full time as the Creative Director for Envision Technology Advisors. Web standards really did change my life (as super-cheesy as that sounds)!

Since the Katzenbach & Company site represents my very first project that used CSS for layout instead of tables, I would obviously likely do some of the markup and CSS differently now that I have more experience under my belt, but that’s pretty typical of all projects I guess. It’s rare that I finish a site and I don’t wish I could a few things differently once it is done (and judging from other designers I’ve talked to, I’m not alone in that).

You can check the site out at www.katzenbachandcompany.com.