One of the sites I've been working on for almost a year now has gone live: National College for Leadership of Schools and Children's Services. Responsible for markup, styling and scripting, the site went through numerous visual and requirement changes before the current layout and design was settled upon.

Starting in November 2008 with the then named NCSL (National College for School Leadership), the number of templates could be counted on two hands and script components were non-existent; since then the brand and colour scheme have changed, a font replacement library has been implemented, upgraded then changed (sIFR version two, then three, then Cufon), script components now include tabs, social bookmarking, tooltips and a fully-featured carousel, and the number of templates has ballooned to encompass a wide variety of pages including a number of member-only pages most site visitors will never see.

The client had a very strict set of requirements regarding accessibility, usability and aesthetics, the site was a great challenge and it's brilliant to see it go live. With it now out in the wild, it's a good opportunity to examine just some of the  notable aspects of the project.

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Forms are perhaps the bane of web development for me; you can't get them to look good, you can't find a foolproof way to make them act well and lets not even start of trying to get them into a pacified state, free from the dangers of user input (surprise ending: form input will never be completely trustworthy). A lot of sites would appear to have aesthetically pleasing forms, however this is a careful ruse by them as they sidestep the problem of forms by having only one or two of them, and then they usually only have a few fields. The monstrosities I am required to deal with almost daily are things of grotesque beauty, veritable Rube Goldberg machines of complexity.

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