We think the process is just as important
as the product.

blindmicemedia.com is our way of showing that it's totally possible to build an engaging, distinct, and visually-rich website using valid semantic markup.

Long before implementation, the current blindmicemedia website started as scribbles on a notepad – then lists of requirements and drawings on a whiteboard, followed by some quick mockups and user flow diagrams in Illustrator and OmniGraffle. Some real detail emerged in Photoshop sometime after. And then the coding began.

This site is hand-crafted XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript – written entirely with valid markup. To make creating it as painless and cross-browser as possible, we used the fantastic Prototype JavaScript framework, as well as Scriptaculous. A lot of content on the site is loaded dynamically as needed, via AJAX - like in the portfolio section, for example.

We also use server-side scripting (PHP) in a few places, most notably to detect the user’s browser and serve a different set of stylesheets altogether for IE6. All other browsers, however, see the same standard CSS.

Why no Flash?

Well, we could have used Flash – as a media-heavy portfolio site, this is one of the few cases where a Flash website wouldn’t have been inappropriate. And there’s certainly a lot of cool stuff we could have done. But we want to show you that in the great Venn diagram of life, accessibility compliance, machine-parseability, semantically-valid markup, and visually unique sites don’t have to be mutually exclusive at all. We built the kind of solution we would recommend to our clients.