I didn’t necessarily intend to participate in the CSS Reboot event, but my completion date and May 1st were converging as I worked on the design so I decided to join the ranks of rebooters.
I signed up with two websites—Standards Reboot and CSS Reboot. The former being a lot of fun and the latter being quite a pain.
CSS Reboot
I don’t know what exactly happened to CSS Reboot. About a month before the competition the site finally changed from the previous event’s gallery to the submission site, but it was odd to navigate and the usability on the whole was confusing (it took me a couple weeks to even figure out how to submit a site).
Unfortunately, it only got worse on May 1st. The site didn’t have any noticeable change in the front page layout and there was no information on why some sites were published and others stayed in the “submitted” queue. The most baffling feature (or lack thereof) I found was the inability to upload an “after” screen shot. I comprehensively combed every line of the site and scoured Google to try to find out how to do it; and in the end decided that it was impossible. So that was frustrating to say the least.
Without a site blog or any answers on Google I was left to speculate on most aspects of CSS Reboot. I decided that screen shots were taken automatically and that sites were being reviewed by administrators and published if deemed worthy. Both theories proved incorrect as most sites visited looked different from the provided screen shot and a couple days after May 1st a spam site showed up on the front page. I took a screen shot of the spam site and have provided it here as Figure 1.
To their credit, the spam site was removed fairly quickly, but as of this writing there was another spam site on the front page. So anyways, I hope that CSS Reboot will make a come back for the Fall event or the next year, because it gets too much traffic and is too well known to just disappear.
Standards Reboot
On the other hand, Standards Reboot was a very pleasant and fun experience. The creators have done a wonderful job of promoting the site and ensuring that it is user friendly. They also protected the integrity of the voting by restricting it to registered users (anyone can register though, you don’t have to be participating in the reboot).
I took a screen shot of my site for archival purposes and have included it below as Figure 2.
As you can see in Figure 2 the lowest scoring aspect was semantics. I agree with the voting and it is something that I will be improving upon in future designs.
Finally, one of the most fun aspects of Standards Reboot is that they have official judges. I don’t really know how it’s going to work but I’m looking forward to seeing their results and commentary.
Also, for the record, the site validates now (see the big red “X” in Figure 2). I overlooked a line of markup that needed to be deleted before the site went live.