John Rainsford

Support Web Standards

February 22nd, 2010

Back in early November, 2009, with Blue Beanie Day 2009 approaching, I thought I would email Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman (web standards superhero, amongst other titles), to see if he would mind if I screen printed some posters in the style of his latest book, Designing with Web Standards (3rd Edition), to allow people show their support for Web Standards.
For me, web standards allow me to produce websites to an accepted standard of quality and accessibility. For my clients, I can assure them that their content is reaching the widest possible audience. For the visitors to the websites I create, they can access the content, regardless of their platform or capabilities. The value of standards to any industry is immense- the relatively young world wide web has been catching up with other more established industries for years and Jeffrey Zeldman, has been a very vocal advocate of web standards for over a decade.
I didn’t get anything done for Blue Beanie Day, but given more time, I started coming up with ideas for other products, not just posters. I then emailed Mr. Zeldman and suggested a shop specifically for selling products to support web standards and he was, as always, enthusiastic and supportive of the idea.
Fast forward a few months, delays, bad weather, illness, more delays (all on my end) and we are nearly ready to launch a range of products designed solely to celebrate and promote web standards. We have posters, buttons and vinyl stickers, all lined up, nearly ready to be released. It’s getting exciting now, I had to upload a photo of our buttons to Flickr, because they are really really great.
The website is nearly finished, but until then you could follow @usewebstandards on Twitter (couldn’t get a longer twitter username) or subscribe to the RSS of this site, as I will be posting follow-up posts regarding production of the products, as well as launch dates.