For the past few years, I’ve been looking back at creative and business decisions I made, and wondering how wise they were. This is the story of one of those decisions.
In 2008, A List Apart, for people who make websites™ reached its tenth year of independent publishing. Looking back on ten years of the magazine’s web standards advocacy, I decided it was time to broaden out ALA’s mission. It was time, in short, to take a more holistic approach to web design, covering all the skills required to create great usable web content and applications. If we failed to do this, I feared, we would stop leading the industry and turn into “merely the CSS trick of the week”—as I phrased my concern to the ALA staff.
Here’s how I explained A List Apart’s change of direction on this very site:
For most of its decade of publication, ALA has been the leading journal of standards-based web design. Initially a lonely voice in the desert, we taught CSS layout before browsers correctly supported it, and helped The WaSP persuade browser makers to do the right thing. Once browsers’ standards support was up to snuff, we educated and excited designers and developers about standards-based design, preaching accessibility, teaching semantic markup, and helping you strategize how to sell this new way of designing websites to your clients, coworkers, and boss.
Most famously, over the years, writers for ALA have presented the design community with one amazing and powerfully useful new CSS technique after another. Initially radically new techniques that are now part of the vocabulary of all web designers include Paul Sowden’s “Alternative Styles,” Mark Newhouse’s list-based navigation, Eric Meyer’s intro to print styles, Douglas Bowman’s “Sliding Doors,” Dave Shea’s “CSS Sprites,” Dan Cederholm’s “Faux Columns,” Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb’s “Suckerfish Dropdowns,” Drew McLellan’s “Flash Satay,” and so on and so on. There are literally too many great ones to name here. (Newcomers to standards-based design, check Erin Lynch’s “The ALA Primer Part Two: Resources For Beginners“.)
Web standards are in our DNA and will always be a core part of our editorial focus. Standards fans, never fear. We will not abandon our post. But since late 2005, we have consciously begun steering ALA back to its earliest roots as a magazine for all people who make websites—writers, architects, strategists, researchers, and yes, even marketers and clients as well as designers and developers. This means that, along with issues that focus on new methods and subtleties of markup and layout, we will also publish issues that discuss practical and sometimes theoretical aspects of user experience design, from the implications of ubiquitous computing to keeping communities civil. — A List Apart is Changing
Here’s what I thought:
As browser support for CSS continued to improve, our community could spend less time inventing and memorizing workarounds like Dave’s CSS Sprites, Dan’s Faux Columns, and so on. We needed those workarounds at the beginning of the fight for web standards support, and we still needed some of them in 2008. But the need was lessening as standards came of age, and as folks in the web design community began using CSS as a matter of course, instead of something that had to be argued for and worked around.
Behind the decision
Focusing on CSS, semantic markup, and workarounds had made sense during the early standards advocacy period, but it was time to begin turning the ship around to focus on customer research, content strategy, customer safety, and so on.
I reasoned that most of the web designers I knew were generalists, like me, who could write a little, design a little, code a little, and so on. Such readers would probably be just as interested in, say, Information Architecture and inclusive design as they had been in front-end code.
I also knew that web design was beginning to transition from a mostly freelance and small studio concern to a corporate, in-house one; with this change came increased specialization.
I wanted A List Apart to be for everyone. For folks who wrote CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, it goes without saying. But also for those curious about the web’s emerging possibilities as an applications platform, the world’s newspaper, and so on. Adding the new topics to our mix made sense to me.
It was also the principle behind Eric Meyer’s and my An Event Apart conference (RIP)—a single track, multi-day event covering everything from pixels to prose, coding to content—and beyond. That conference found its audience. Until COVID, it was a success as a curriculum and as a business.
Pushback will find you in the end
But the holistic approach was less successful on A List Apart. The nuanced argument I thought I was making (web standards will always be essential to our mix, but we need to learn other skills as well) turned off some readers and writers.
Hand to God, I even received emails from some of our magazine’s top contributors accusing me of abandoning our mission. They said they were off to write for other publications (mainly Smashing Magazine), and they were as good as their word. If I ever changed my mind about my apparently offensive decision, they said, they might consider writing for ALA again. But I should not hold my breath.
These writers’ reactions surprised me. They also hurt. And they annoyed me because I thought I’d clearly explained that adding new topics didn’t mean ending the original topic. It was like saying no to the meal because you didn’t love the dessert.
Nevertheless, there began to be a dropping-off in ALA’s sheer number of readers, as well—even though our new content also attracted new readers. Some of that drop-off had to do with purely mechanical problems, e.g. an ill-fated temporary site migration that broke our existing URLs—the ones folks had been bookmarking and recommending for a decade. And where our redirect engine somehow also failed, so that folks returning to a beloved bookmark couldn’t get there except via Search.
Look back in angora
So: Was broadening the focus a mistake? From a pure business point of view, it was. Readership declined. Readers who had devoured A List Apart entirely because of its singular focus on standards-based front-end design now became more interested in my friendly competitor’s publication. Writers who had made their names on A List Apart became associated with Smashing instead. And a new publication—CSS Tricks—soon captured much of the rest of the ALA audience. A List Apart was still read and respected, but our most hardcore readers and writers were now likely to get their CSS fix elsewhere.
This all came back to mind as I watched Geoff Graham and a small band of humans resurrect CSS Tricks this week (after the original owners sold it to a company that had no idea what to do with it other than cram it full of ads).
I respect and am delighted for Geoff Graham and his readers, and I plan to be a CSS Tricks reader myself.
So: in broadening ALA’s focus, had I done the right thing?
I would not be happy if ALA were still almost entirely focused on front-end code because my restless brain has long since moved on to other topics. So from a purely selfish creative POV, changing ALA was the right decision for me.
Besides, even with A List Apart mostly quiet these days, our community has two great places to soak up fine articles on standards-based design. And today we also have a vast range of individual blogs on which to read innovative ideas. That was not the case in 1998 when ALA launched.
I built ALA to serve a particular need. A need nobody in 1998 was meeting. That need continues to be satisfied to this day. So the community is unhurt.
And of course ALA readers who stuck with us gained knowledge across a tremendous range of important topics. Which supports my thought that it was the right educational decision to broaden our range of topics.
But as a business decision? Probably not my best. (What do you think?)
