MT Redesign, tables?

at 20:34 on 18 October 2006, David B. wrote:

Wow, graphically this site is beautiful, but I almost pooped in my pants when I looked under the hood. Now don't get me wrong, I am not in the crowd that believes validity is the end all be all, and I am surly no standardista, but for a hosting company that prides itself on being the 'unofficial' design community web host, this was a shock ... and I'm a customer.

The only reason I even looked under the hood is because I have plugins in my browser for production that show validation and I was curious =). Maybe this is in response to IE7, a member of logopond told me our site needs work in IE7, do you think MT saw this and decided to go tables to compensate?

What do you all think, much todo about nothing?

at 20:41 on 18 October 2006, paul wrote:

agreed, i was hoping the site would be a little more standards-y considering who they cater their services too.

i did just upgrade to "gridserver" though, and it seems so go so far (plus i can now add on 95 more domains than i could previously)! and now i can play with some RoR action.

at 21:09 on 18 October 2006, David B. wrote:

RoR thats what I'm interested in, I have been mulling over playing with it, but never had a testing ground. If I can switch our site back from their DV that will be interesting to play around with.

at 21:36 on 18 October 2006, Seth Aldridge wrote:

They are letting our company pro-rate the months that we haven't used yet to upgrade to ColdFusion...we got the two year DV and needed to upgrade. They were really cool about it.

at 22:21 on 18 October 2006, Ed wrote:

So would going to tables make the site work in IE7... doesn't that seem a little backwards?

I know one thing I haven't been able to test IE7 to great. But what I decieded to do was to take the precaution and remove my IE6 hacks from my css and place them in their own file. So IE7 won't be effect by that code.

at 03:04 on 19 October 2006, MazY wrote:

I think there has to be some bizarre design joke that we're just not party to. This, combined with Shaun's recent carbuncle, has to mean that there's something mysterious going on I tell you, maybe even evil.

I sense devil worship...

at 04:09 on 19 October 2006, Ian Gordon wrote:

They use Dreamweaver and the whole Macromedia family of products to create their site and graphics, well Adobe Family now but, since they are a hosting company as long as the hosting is good, I don't care if they use tables or not.

at 04:16 on 19 October 2006, David B. wrote:

@Ian, I can appreciate that, but why take that step backwards? their last site to my last understanding was standards based, why take this one backward? The design certainly doesn't call for it...

And btw what does using dreamweaver have anything at all to do with a site being designed with tables? I use dreamweaver and I create standards compliant work...

@Ed I dont use hacks and my site was still messed up in IE7 so it wasnt that. Works perfectly in all browsers from Opera to Safari and all the others in between, so its got to be something else.

I told myself that until it becomes more wide spread - ie show up in my server logs - I'm not worried about it. It was just a minor thing anyway.

at 19:25 on 19 October 2006, G3 wrote:

Eeerrrrr. A site can still be designed tableless and still work in ie7. They are called cascading style sheets and conditional statements.

What's really cool to me is Ruby support. I might start developing in Ruby by next August when my Rackspace contract is up :)

at 07:03 on 20 October 2006, Chris Robinson wrote:

Ok, to end the debate as to why they went the route they did I talked to a tech up at MediaTemple.

He said "We went with a mix of tables and CSS based layout for the reason that there's pretty much no text on the home page so it helps them in some way to be better ranked in Google their main focus, secondary it allows the site to flow and better match thier Account Center or Control Panel."

That's it.

BTW I just switched over to them and I have nothing but great things to say their Tech department is unrivaled by any other hosting company I've encountered and the price $20 for 100GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth!!!!!! You simply can't beat that.

Hope that clears things up.

at 23:29 on 22 October 2006, Brad wrote:

http://www.bluehost.com/

A lot cheaper, but half the storage (50 gigs).

at 01:44 on 23 October 2006, Chris Robinson wrote:

they also only offer 6 sites per account, versus MT's 100

at 00:21 on 24 October 2006, Nate Cavanaugh wrote:

Dreamhost offers unlimited, as well as 200gbs of space, 1 tb of transfer, for only 8 bucks a month.

And shell access, and RoR, and PHP 4 or 5, and blah blah.

They just rock.

By the way, you don't have to use tables to make something work in IE7, nor do you need to avoid dreamweaver.

You just need to hire a developer and designer that know what they're doing.

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