NEATTA.org: High Tech for the Low Tech
Today I launched the latest collaboration with my brother: The New England Antique Tractor and Truck Association web site.
Some background.
My father’s latest obsession has been acquiring and restoring antique tractors. I was raised in pretty rural Rehoboth, MA (where he still lives) and he and many of his contacts have formed NEATTA, the new England Antique Tractor and Truck Association. At a meeting, my brother and I were “nominated” to design the web site (”Hey Ed, your sons do that ca-raaazy web stuff, right?”).
While my time has been pretty thin lately, I took it as a challenge. My portion of the site (design, XHTML, and CSS) took about a grand total of ten hours—very important since I was paid the going rate of zero dollars per hour. (Hey, it’s a dot org.)
But in that amount of time, I was able to use the site as a sandbox for some cool technologies. You might say a little too cool for the target audience. I mean, how many blind tractor operators are there? If there are some, though, they will be greeted at NEATTA.org with open arms.
Some highlights:
- Microformats: Yes, an antique tractor site has Microformats. I microformatted the upcoming event in the sidebar as well as the contact information on the Contacts/Links page. I don’t have much contact information yet, though, so all you get are titles and phone numbers.
- Web Standards: It is a 100% CSS-based design.
- Semantic Markup: All the underlying code is very easy to understand. We use H’s 1-4, a bunch of definition lists (loving these lately), and of course the unordered list for navigation.
- Accessible and Usable: Links have semantic title attributes (and warn you when a new window will open), images have their alts, none of that “click here” junk, you are warned with a file format and size when opening a PDF, abbreviation tags are complete, etc.
- Bulletproof: This was the biggest for me. It’s bulletproof in a few different areas:
- Content areas: It will expand just fine as the text expands.
- The DigDug test: Blowing up the text will expose more of the banner. None of the layout breaks.
- Images off: Alt tags are shown with images off. The banner disappears and is not replaced by text (though you will see an h1 and h2 in the unstyled version). Is this an issue? I think not because the first sentence of text tells you exactly where you are in the event that the banner is not visible.
- Pretty: Simple, but pretty (at least I think so). I don’t ever use red, so that was another nice challenge.
There will be more features added over time, such as:
- A Style Switcher: Right now, the look mimics the old school red Farmall tractors. I’d like to throw in a style switcher that will change the look to green and yellow for the John Deere fans.
- Classifieds: We’re going to implement some lo-fi classifieds soon (no backend). If it is popular enough, we will automate it.
- Message Board: If they think they want one, I’ll put one in.
- Blog?: Heck, I think we’re pushing it with the user base already. Give ‘em time to digest!
I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I’m looking forward to seeing member feedback. Their old site was just a sliced up image, so this should improve things big time.
Very clean, well done.
looks really cool adam, i dig it