• Reported by Nate

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., the parent company to CNN, TBS, TNT, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network and many other network brands and businesses, has redesigned their corporate website, and done so with a CSS based layout, and standards compliant XHTML markup.

Web-graphics author Arturo and I (aka Twinsparc), were contracted to produce the new design and markup. Todd Dominey produced the very flexible flash portion on the home page; more about that later.

What's interesting about this re-design, besides that a really prominent news and entertainment company has adopted web standards, is how they came to appreciate the methodology. Since its inception three years ago, Twinsparc has strived to create only standards based websites - and indeed about 90% of our work has fallen into this category, but in all previous cases we've had to put on a little song and dance to describe the somewhat abstract concepts behind it. In Turner's case, we were granted this job because they were actively looking for contractors with experience developing web standards based websites.

To me, this seems like turning point. I was really surprised when Eddie Garrett, director of communications and new media for Turner, explained his interest in creating the new Turner.com website using web standards. I thought we had at least several more years before the choice to develop big brand websites this way would come from within the decision-making group themselves.

I'd like to take a moment to thank the various folks we worked with at Turner; everyone was remarkably nice to us and it was a pleasure to interact with such a competent group. And speaking of competent, back to Todd's flash work on the home page. The animation you see there might look pretty straightforward, but what you're not seeing is that this thing dynamically loads either JPGs or SWF files, has adjustable fade controls, and even a method for linking just part of an image (sort of like making an image map) . This flash piece has real power under the hood, and because of it, the various branding folks at each of the major Turner networks can produce custom lead-ins to their current promotions with lots of design flexibility.