Today, while doing a bit of sorting through old stuff, I stumbled across some pages from notebooks I’d kept during my time at secondary school. The notebooks are part of a series I contributed to with my friends. I think there are about 4 or 5 in total, I have one, my friends have the others. I guess this was my first open source project. Everyone in my small group of friends contributed to them, writing, and sometimes drawing what happened throughout the day.
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While working at Clearleft, I learnt the importance of thorough planning before site development. Planning how you are going to write the code is just as important as how you are going to design the site. It makes you really think about blocks of content as individual, reusable components and helps make your CSS more consistent and easier for someone else to understand.
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A lot of the clients I work with who have just set up a web presence for their company think it’s a good idea to start a mailing list and a blog. Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t they? The problem is, so few companies get it right and very few people will bother to read them.
If you’re like me, there are very few corporate mailing lists you willingly subscribe to. They’re just so boring and salesy.
The Innocent Smoothie website is one of the few companies that I think get their corporate blog spot on. Even though I rarely buy their drinks (too expensive for me), I still enjoy reading it.
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While on the train to Future of Web Apps, I saw some adverts for Dixons displayed in the carriages. Here is the text from one of them:
“Step into middle England’s best loved department store, stroll through haberdashery to the audio visual department where an awfully well brought up young man will bend over backwards to find the right TV for you. Then go to Dixons.co.uk and buy it”.
(Also, note the tagline: “Dixons.co.uk – the last place you want to go”)
I thought this was a really clever, albeit cheeky advertisement. It is brutally honest, and makes the point to look elsewhere for a better browsing experience, but once you’ve tasted what’s on offer, to go to the place that sells it cheaper. It draws upon the fact that although we love good user experience, we are heavily swayed by price.
However, what does this say about user experience? This ad suggests that only the luxury retailers can offer it, that it’s expensive, middle class and unnecessary after the product has been chosen. But is it? Surely good user experience extends beyond the point of sale, and even in a recession, it should be an investment, not an overhead.
Have Dixons shot themselves in the foot, or do they have a point? Is good user experience only for the high-end of the market, and should retailers like Dixons continue to scrimp on customer service and let retailers like John Lewis pick up the bill?
Problem: You want to create a grid based layout with floats, but you don’t want to wrap things in extraneous divs to force blocks to clear properly.
In an ideal world, all the content is the same height, and blocks will float and clear properly. But this is not an ideal world.
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Today I gave a talk at a web conference called Tomorrow’s Web, which was organised by Rob Day, 16, and Grant Bell, 17. My talk was about how to be a good freelancer, and I’ll be uploading my slides, notes, links, and hopefully some video in my next post, but here’s a summary of some of the speakers.
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Whenever I am asked what I do by someone who doesn’t work in my industry, I find it quite hard to give them a decent response. I usually just tell them I’m a website designer, even though that’s not really accurate and I’m more confident working with code than on a design.
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In 1992, Radiohead released their first single; Creep. The song became very popular and they had to play it at every gig to satisfy their fans, and it wasn’t long before the band became sick of their creation. They brought out new songs, but people just wanted to listen to the old ones, and they will forever be remembered as the band that wrote Creep.
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If you run an online banking service, surely the most important feature on the site should be security. However, we all know that your data is only as secure as the password you use to protect it. This is why I find it so shocking that Natwest online banking has such a strange policy on what your password can and can’t contain.
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This week I finally finished writing a contract I am happy with giving to clients. I thought it might be useful to give you an overview of what is in it, as I know there are a lot of people who still don’t use them. I don’t think it’s until you’ve been burnt that you truly appreciate how useful they are.
I used Andy Clarke’s article in 24ways as a guide. I strongly recommend you take a look first, I think he sets the right tone in his (more colloquial than legal fluff).
I’m not going to give you an exact replication of what it contains before I check it over with a lawyer. I also think it’s important to write it yourself so that you know and understand it inside out, but here are a few things you really should mention in it.
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The Portland Arms pub website was commisioned by the landlady to provide information to locals about events at the pub, as well as an up-to-date seasonal menu. The pub dog, Buster, updates his online blog (http://www.theportlandarmspub.co.uk/blog/bustersblog.html) with his perspective of life at the Portland Arms, with photos of the people, and other dogs, he meets.
The landlady takes photos using her iPhone of the food served in the kitchen and uploads them to the website via Flickr. She also takes photos at special events, and these are automatically posted to a slideshow on the site (http://www.theportlandarmspub.co.uk/gallery.php). Many locals didn’t know where the pub was, so I added a Google map which shows users where the pub is, and they can plan their route to the pub using this feature.
Today, the holding page for scrunchup.com was launched. Everyone involved in the project has been stunned by the overwhelming response it has had. An hour after it was published, we’d had 100 subscribers to the mailing list.
So what’s this all about?
It’s not easy for young people starting out in the web design/development industry. There seems to be the assumption that teenage-webbie-wannabies are only interested in making a quick buck. Many don’t attend conferences or meetups, and there are few courses that use up-to-date material.
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The British Band Instrument Company website was launched as an online brochure of instruments being sold to across the world, specifically in the Middle East. I added a translation feature, and made all the text editable so it could be translated into different languages. After some research, I placed the navigation on the right rather than the left because people in the Middle East read from right to left. I also added images onto the buttons (using the “sliding doors” technique) so that the user could visually distinguish the instruments. I used the sliding doors technique to speed up load time and ensured the site was usable on IE6 at a screen resolution of 800×600, as I anticipated that many users in this part of the world would not have fast Internet speeds or high-end technology.
A few days ago, I came upon the CushyCMS website www.cushycms.com
I’ve tried using Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla! and Mambo, and I’m not going to pretend this is better than them all. It’s not, it just meets a different need. Whereas CMSs such as Wordpress are great if you want to make a site with a blog, have the ability to add pages, plugins, and change themes, sometimes sites don’t need all that functionality. Maybe on a 5 page site, you just want to be able to let the client change a few words every now and then, so a full-blown CMS can be a little overwhelming.
On Thursday, Harriet Harman the Equalities Minister in the UK put forward plans to allow organisations to discriminate in favour of candidates who are female or of ethnic minority.
You can watch her speech here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7475470.stm
As a woman, I would not want to be given a job with the knowledge that the reason I got it had to do with my gender rather than my professional capabilities, and I would not want my colleagues to also be thinking that. In fact, it would put me off working anywhere with a high ratio of men to women. I want to work somewhere because my work is appreciated, not so they can tick a box or improve their statistics.
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I will have to be brief because I feel riddled with guilt whenever I spend time doing anything other than revision.
So this is the second week of exams. Last week I did my Module 4 ICT exam, which was… well… the questions were quite reasonable, apart from the one asking me to describe the ‘behaviour’ of a computer system which threw me a bit. I was feeling great at the beginning of the exam and pacing myself well (even writing legibly!) Last year I rushed and finished in half the time and spent the remaining hour fretting because I thought I hadn’t been given all of the questions.
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In this year’s Future of Web Design conference, Andy Budd gave a fantastic talk comparing User Experience on websites with the hotel industry. He described the need for a good first impression, and the importance of going the extra mile to make the customer feel comfortable and ultimately leave with a good impression.
I worked for almost 2 years in the fast food industry, albeit making and serving fruit smoothies. Although this could be described as a huge contrast to the hotel industry, I think there are still a lot of similarities because they both rely on good User Experience. The main difference between the User Experience in a hotel and in a fast food restaurant is customer expectations. In a fast food place, customers don’t expect to be served a gourmet meal in less than 5 minutes. They understand that they may have to queue for a short while, that the tables won’t have tablecloths, will probably be a bit sticky and the cutlery will be made of plastic because they don’t have to pay as much. But customers are usually willing to pay more for exactly the same thing, but where they’ll get better customer service.
Here are a few tips I’ve learned from my experience of the fast food industry that can be applied to the web.
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It’s tough this time of the year when everyone seems to have gone in hibernation for exams. It feels like the times I am in school, I only see my friends briefly, and I’ve been spending way too much time cooped up at home with a stack of revision notes and a grumpy moulting cat to keep me company.
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There’s a really sweet girl I babysit, and last night, she drew a picture of me. It took her about 15 minutes, and I was so happy with the result that I thought I’d post it up here.
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Today my friend Raiesa took me to see a little garden she had found. She’d been telling me about it for a while, and I hadn’t had a chance to see it with all the coursework I was working on. Today I met her in the library and we walked along a scenic route to some old ruins. There’s a little footpath by the river which we followed past some allotments, up some steep steps and over an old railway bridge. After a few minutes, we reached a wooden gate. She opened it and we walked through.
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Future of web design is a conference hosted by Carsonified. The speakers are all influential designers, specialising in fields such as User Experience and Branding. This year’s event took place from the 16th to the 18th of April.
As much as I’d like to, I’m not going to write a minute-by-minute account of the Future Of Web Design conference. I’m suffering from the side-effects of writing 300 pages for my IT coursework and I’m not sure how much more I can type before my swollen fingers drop off. So I’m going to summarise a few of the good and not so good events of the 3 days.
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I hope the following doesn’t sound *too* cheesy, but it’s something I feel very passionately about. I think the negativities of the Internet are all too often over publicised, whilst the positives are rarely highlighted. When we look back on past events, the apartheid, gay discrimination, the holocaust… it makes us wonder how people we as a society could let these sorts of things happen. I guess the problem was bias. People formed decisions based on what the government told them. The Internet is a contrast to this bias, with people from different backgrounds and cultures living all over the world writing about things that are important to them. So if there ever was a greater opportunity for peace, I believe its in the Internet.
Yesterday, after months and months and months of saving, I finally bought a Mac. I think I’ve been saving for over a year now, so it’s hard to describe how I felt when I was able to take my baby home! Excited mostly, but also a little nervous about making such a financial commitment over something I had never had a chance to use before.
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I spend most of my lunchtime in my school library with my friends. It’s a lovely place to be, warm, cosy and it doesn’t smell bad like the common room. The other day was a bit weird because most of my friends had gone home, all except for my friend Mishka. We were reading through the Ofsted report which had just been published, and giggling because… I don’t know, it just seemed funny at the time.
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Today I’m going to talk about something vitally important and close to my heart… biscuits! The following is a constructive analysis of my 5 favourite biscuits, weighing out their pros and cons.
Isn’t it obvious that I’m putting off doing something more important?
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Had a nice surprise this week. A friend who had asked me to look/play about with a menu she’d made for her dad’s Thai takeaway contacted me to say the logo I’d done for it was being used as their shop sign! I’ve designed so much stuff that’s only seen on computers that when it does get made into something that’s bigger than me… very cool!
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A few weeks ago, a group of sixth-formers including myself were asked to sing at a conference in London. We were given few details, (except that 250 headteachers, and Madonna might be there) and very little time to rehearse for it. We didn’t even know where it was or whether there would be the use of a piano there. Yesterday we were minibussed to the Foreign Office in London, and I have to say, it was one of the most interesting experiences in my life.
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This website has been up and running for over a year. However, I was so ashamed of the last design that I didn’t tell anyone about it. And what’s the point in having a website that you don’t want anyone to see?
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