Accessites and Revish
Two of the sites I have an interest in, Accessites and Revish have undergone some changes recently. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m one of the site graders for Accessites. At times, this has meant quite a significant investment of time from all of the graders, and because we do have other lives to lead — as well as the day job, many of us have children, many of us want to be able to have a social life and so on, so we decided to tweak a number of the ways we do things.
Initially, the way the gradings were based probably favoured sites which were technically very sound irrespective of the quality of the design — although obviously nice designs would score slightly higher! However, as what we were seeking to do was to provide a showcase for stunningly designed accessible sites, that wasn’t quite what we were aiming for. We wanted to emphasise that they have to have a nice design.
After some discussion we therefore decided to drop the formal grading sheets, revise our criteria, and discuss site submissions as a group before deciding at what level (if any) a site should be awarded. The theory is that each site will have less formal work, but input from more of the Accessites members.
Oh, and by the way, I’m not claiming any credit for the new design, the changes to the site infrastructure and so on — I’ve done precisely bugger-all to help with that, so this is just an opportunity for me to record my public thanks to those team members who did spend a lot of time contributing to this.
Well done, you lot. This is really just a very brief talk about what we’ve done, so if you haven’t already, why not go and read the article A New Tool, A New Look, A New Method on the all-new, improved, shifts even the most stubborn stains and kills 99% of all known germs Accessites site?
Meanwhile, the Revish team (or “Danâ€, as he’s more commonly known, since he’s done something like 99% of the work on it to date) have been hard at work building the interfaces and APIs and moving to a more formal and wide ranging beta test. To be honest, apart from writing some of the wording here and there, my role in the Revish Team to date has been mostly to act as a sounding board to Dan, testing stuff for him and throwing an idea at him every now and again.
To be honest, I’m happy doing pretty much whatever I’m asked to do here: Dan’s a mate, the site is a great idea and I want to be involved in it, so I’m more than happy to help in any way I can — it’s just that sometimes I don’t really feel I’ve earned my “Team Revish†badge (although on the other hand, the Team Revish badge is one of the things I did do).
There’s still nothing much to see “live†as yet — although do check out the Revish blog to find out what’s been going on — but we’ve certainly reached the stage whereby we’re firming up (or, as I say, Dan’s firming up) what’s on the site, how it’s going to work and so on — which is part of the point of the testing that is underway at the moment.
I’m really looking forward to this, since a lot of the people I know ‘online’ have written book reviews on their sites, they seem to be interested in books and I’m hoping that this can be a great success.
So, keep your eyes open for this. It’s coming soon — probably in March.
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