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Process

How to get new styles accepted as part of the main site brand.

Issue

We need to strike a balance between innovation and customisation of microsites with overall site management and brand compliance.

Requests for CSS, JavaScript or template changes

Note the nature of the problem in the Rebranding community database (you need to be a member to access this). You can either simply note the existence of an issue, or provide a fully working solution, or anything in between.

Please notify members of the new issue, this allows your peers to look at the issue and suggest possible solutions or improvements.

The standards manager will ultimately decide whether to adopt a particular solution based upon the following.

Factors in favour of a particular solution

  • Improves usability
  • Improves accessibility
  • Uses valid mark-up
  • Improves page appearance
  • Solution is scalable, and easily applied to similar areas
  • Is genuinely new
  • Is easy for all team members to adopt, and easy to fix
  • Uses progressive enhancement principles
  • Cross platform and browser compatible including print and hand-held media
  • Is semantic

Factors working against a particular solution

  • Reduces usability
  • Reduces accessibility
  • Uses deprecated or invalid mark-up
  • Reduces quality of page appearance
  • Solution is niche, applicable to one page only
  • Reproduces an existing function/style
  • Difficult to edit and maintain
  • In-line scripts, or in-line styles
  • Does not work on particular browsers, prints poorly or does not display on hand-held devices
  • Non semantic

Timing

We need to keep template updates to a minimum, and wish to batch changes to CSS and JavaScript to reduce the burden of ensuring all sites and all parties are up to date. There may be occasions when a particular fix is required quickly, quicker than it is possible to roll out a site wide change. In these cases we'll create a special style and incorporate it into the main architecture at a later date.

Outcome

Accepted ideas will be either be incorporated into the main CSS/JavaScript, or if more niche, built into a custom CSS/JS file to reside in /styles/special/*.css or /js/*.js

Rejected ideas are obviously not used.