A while ago Marko wrote about reusability of css based designs. I didn’t agree with him fully but had no idea how to explain/prove it.
In the times of table layouts the process od redesigning a site was actually (at least) three things. First the content was restructured and some of it written again (the sitemap). Then the layout was changed to reflect the new structure and to better fit the content (the wireframes). At the end a façade was made for reflecting the latest trends in ‘webdesign’ (the design – or is there a better word for it?). Even if it was a three way process it was rarely done by three different people – ‘webdesigners’ did almost everything themselves. Since this was quite a lengthy process it was also expensive and some corporate websites changed once every three (or more) years.
Now it seems things are changing for the better. With a DIV layout, CSS based designs and a strict separation of layout and content we can actually split these three into separate stages. The strict division of these stages gives us the posibility to focus our work on what it really has to achieve. It’s true that you cannot use the whole 100% of the other parts but being able to keep 80% is good enough.
About a week ago I found out about two ‘design’ contents and the one Slashdot is holding was interesting because it was about proving a point – you can change the façade without changing the layout or the content. I did the whole thing without changing a bit of HTML (with a bit ugly CSS, would be nicer if a few lines of the code were changed).
I think this way of thinking will settle in and more and more changes will include only one of the three stages. Hopefully they will be based on user testing and/or usage data…