Creative Ireland Facelift

Who cares? :) Its still bloated 90's markup. And they call themselves the best resource for Irish creative types?

Not sure if you noticed the w3 validator facelift from last month - which is standards compliant and good looking.

The w3c site has been growing from strength to strength.
The CI facelift is refreshing from a visual point of view although I hadn't had the chance to examine the underlying code

"Irish creative types" not "Irish coder types"
Web work is a small part of the site.
It has managed to do what a 100 W3c fully validated sites probably couldn't. It has built a vibrant creative community that has become the central hub of the online creative community in Ireland. It is also the central site to go to when posting or looking for a quality job.
It does exactly what it says on the tin and makes no pretensions to something else. That's a successfull site to me.

Don't get me wrong, I am an advocate of valid compliant code however realistically W3C technical requirements are important in some areas not all. You cant loose focus on what is actually important when building a site and community. W3C is a very small part overall.

I agree Alan, but re-designing for the sake of it and not validating the site at the same time seems like a wasted opportunity to me. They can obviously do whatever they like and seem to be very successful at what they do.

I've been accused of being a validation nazi in the past and this is possibly true - at least they don't falsely display a validation logo - but I just don't understand why any site that is re-designing / re-branding right now wouldn't at least try to validate. It doesn't have to XHTML Strict and its not exactly hard to do.

Just my 3 cents.

Oops posted too quickly.

"It is also the central site to go to when posting or looking for a quality job."

I disagree - quality *Dublin* jobs perhaps, but I see a lot of jobs available in print / design shops outside Dublin that do not get posted there. Eight in ten jobs I see offered at CI are Dublin area based. 90% of Dublin jobs I see advertised elsewhere are also on CI. I do realise that Dublin has a much larger creative community than elsewhere in Ireland, but CI (probably not their fault) jobsdesk is for the most part a *Dublin* jobsdesk.

I agree its a wasted opportunity but in the end probably makes little difference to the users and the sites growth.
Not having spoken to Stephen, who runs the site, in a while I can only go on old chats.

He does not consider himself a web designer.
Creative Ireland is a hobby site for him (despite the importance it has taken on for other designers).
Technically he is stuck with an older version of the forum software and either doesn't have time/know how to update to a more modern valid version.

On the Jobs front, any companies that I rate in terms of design output and would want to work for advertise there. Not saying that companies that don't advertise there are not good, just I haven't heard of them.
I advertised there and I am outside Dublin but then I could be of the 10%.
I would also offer the argument that 8 in 10 design jobs in the country are based in Dublin.