Anna Debenham
This year, Goodreads tells me I managed to read 24 books in 2023 which is well down from the 40 I read last year, but much higher than the measly 8 I managed in 2021. I think technically it's 26...
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boldstart
medium
According to Goodreads, this year, I read 40 books. This was a huge jump from the 8 I read in 2021. I had more time on my hands after leaving Snyk at the end of spring, and devoted a lot...
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When you're planning a new feature, perhaps you have a big checklist of things you go through. Or maybe you don't, and just hope that you've remembered everything. I was one of those checklist people, adding items to my launchlist...
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It's been almost three years since I last posted here. Time's gone both quickly, and slowly. It seems pertinent that my last post was about my favourite books about the apocalypse, given the apocalyptic themes of the past few weeks…...
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24 ways
It feels a bit macabre to admit it, but I’m a big fan of the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic genre. I’m in my happy place when I’m watching zombies chase after Rick in The Walking Dead, or killing Radroaches in Fallout. This is...
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I was fifteen. I was cycling home from school, just a few roads left to go. The last stretch was tough, a main A-road. I notice a blue car pull up alongside me, as if overtaking. But it doesn't overtake,...
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I'm playing Horizon Zero Dawn and loving every second. It's exactly my kind of game – a massive open world FPS with an interesting storyline with stealth, crafting, and to top it all off, set in a post apocalyptic future....
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The Guardian's Chips with Everything podcast recently published an episode about the Y2K bug, which I recommend you listen to if you write software. The Y2K bug came about due to the small amount of storage space that computers traditionally...
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My last post was a behind the scenes report on writing my book, Front-end Style Guides. It had this whole section about finances which I didn't feel ready to share, so I put it to one side. I'm still not...
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Last week, I published a new version of my book, Front-end Style Guides. A lot of work went into it over several years, and I thought it would be worth writing about that, and my experience with self-publishing. Why I...
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One of the first things I bought when we moved into our house a couple of years ago was a hedgehog house. I wasn't sure if there were hedgehogs in the area, but it's hard to know, since they only...
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Yesterday, I got a pull request from our designer. I'd been annotating colours for our style guide, and he had "corrected" my label from blue to green. It's blue! It's definitely blue! To me, at least. Rewind to November last...
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Today I gave a talk at From the Front in Bologna, Italy. It's the first conference I've spoken at that has been simultaneously interpreted, and over the past few weeks I've been fretting about how it might turn out. My...
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After a long hiatus, I decided to start speaking at conferences again. Last year I dipped my toe back in the water, accepting a couple of speaking gigs in the UK. I get nervous speaking; it doesn't come at all...
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So, I recently bought a new lamp, and it had a part that needed unscrewing. Now, I've got a really fancy screwdriver. It's an ergonomic, ratcheting screwdriver and it's ace. But it was in my toolbox, and I just wanted...
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In this article, I'm going to talk a bit about the browser on the Moto 360. Smartwatches are a very new device, and we don't know how popular they will be in the next few years or how people are...
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I get a lot of emails from people asking for careers and freelance advice, and I don't always have the time to respond as fully as I'd like, so I decided to write up the advice I've given over the...
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Net Magazine
2004 was the worst year of my life. The two that followed it were likely just as bad, but 2004 stands out to me because it was the only year I kept a diary. If I hadn't kept this record,...
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In Episode 112 of The Big Web Show, Jeffrey Zeldman talks with Mat Marquis about, among other things, their first jobs. Mat did a lot of random jobs before he got started in web design, including carpentry. One of Jeffrey's...
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I have a confession to make… I collect stamps. I have hundreds of them. Yeah, it may not be one of the coolest hobbies in the world, but give me a minute and I'll explain why I do it. I...
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A List Apart
I recently updated my 3DS XL console's software and this evening I was having a look at what was new in the browser. It started by asking me if I wanted Yahoo or Google as the default search engine. I...
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I move a lot. When I first moved to Brighton, into a small room in a house with 5 students, I took a suitcase of clothes, a bag with my laptop and a couple of books, and 2 plastic boxes...
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In this week's episode of Unfinished Business, I talk with Andy about business disasters, and we share some of our experiences. I've not had one massive disaster, but most of the little disasters I encountered, I could have avoided. Making...
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Today Microsoft have finally revealed their new console, 8 years after they launched the Xbox 360. That was in 2005, before Twitter, and when YouTube and Facebook were in their infancy. And based on what they've announced, this is it...
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Personal attacks. Nasty comments aimed at individuals. I see it a lot, and most of the time, I've not done anything about it. I've not felt comfortable confronting the people doing it. I've been gradually feeling less safe working in...
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I got an email last night referring to a bit in the latest Unfinished Business where I mention public speaking. It was a stupid comment I made to Andy about how I used to do whatever I could when I...
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Anyone who knows me well knows I love listening to podcasts. I've been listening to them since I got an iPod when I was 16. I have Boagworld to thank for getting me into the industry. I'd never even considered...
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On Cennydd's recommendation, I read Thinking in Systems over a couple of work commutes. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there, particularly this paragraph towards the end: For example, in 1986 new federal legislation required U.S. companies to report...
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I started work a few weeks ago on a project with Leisa Reichelt, a very talented UX designer who organises UX Bootcamp workshops (among many other things). I had the pleasure of teaching on a couple of her Prototyping in...
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I've got an Evernote notebook full of the results of various tests I ran on game console browsers in preparation for my A List Apart article, and I'm currently working on a little site that makes these notes public. There's...
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Turns out, being a freelancer can be a big problem if you want to do something like get a loan with a bank, or even rent somewhere. I want to share a couple of things I did a while ago...
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I've just finished playing Journey. I'd heard lots of good things about it and decided to give it a go. I don't have a lot of time to invest in a new game at the moment so I liked that...
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After writing about the Nintendo DSi browser in July, I began exploring more of the game console browser landscape. I wrote to A List Apart to ask if they'd be interested in running a piece on it, and they said...
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Thursday morning I was in a chemistry lesson, the class was loud. We'd just been sitting our GCSEs and half the students were in a coach on their way to France for a school trip. We were messing about, nobody...
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While doing user testing with children on a prototype of an app I'm helping build, one of the questions we asked was what technology they owned. I was amazed by how many said they had a Nintendo DS. We're not...
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A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk at Nixon McInnes given by Aden Davies who is a social technologies specialist at the bank HSBC. I was interested in attending this talk because I feel that banks are very...
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I helped with another usability session this week, and here are my notes on things I've learnt from this one. Year 6 (9 students aged 10) This session was in a dedicated computer suite. The machines ran Windows XP and...
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Over the past few months, I've been working with Anthony Lewis and Andrea Vaughan on a web app for children. We're not ready to explain what it is or does (you'll understand when you see it), but it's a really...
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Paul Lloyd has an excellent style guide which I'm frequently sending to people who are looking at creating their own. Now he's just released his first version of Barebones on Github. It contains a style guide like the one on...
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At the moment I'm refreshing an old site and adapting some code I wrote 3 years ago. A few of the pages have lists of teasers to full articles which are displayed in a grid. They use nth-of-type to remove...
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I just wanted to quickly write up about a bug I've found in the latest build of Chrome (18.0.1025.142), just in case anyone else experiences the same thing. I've filed a bug report on Chromium (Issue 120846) and have found...
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Last year, I started bookmarking front-end style guides for an article I was writing for 24 ways. When the article was published, I got loads of great recommendations of others to include in the list. So I just wanted to...
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I was at Responsive Summit yesterday, where we spent the day discussing the experiences we've had and challenges we've faced with responsive web design projects. We discussed a lot of things during the day and I'm missing out a huge...
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Today I got the news I thought I'd have to wait a lot longer for. The Education Secretary is announcing that ICT in schools is to be replaced by a computer science and programming curriculum. Back in September, I gave...
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I've been using Fireworks pretty much every day since around 2005, yet every project opens up the opportunity to learn something new. Perhaps this is one of those "well, duh" posts, but I'm writing it up anyway in case it...
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Since giving my first UX Bootcamp workshop on Prototyping in Code, I’ve been looking at ways to make it easier to teach CSS layout. I’ve tried demonstrating floats in a fish tank and how positioning works using diagrams and sketches,...
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I’ve just attended Seb’s CreativeJS workshop in Brighton. After seeing Seb talk at last year’s Full Frontal, and this year’s Update Conference, I was inspired to learn more about what new and exciting things can be done with Javascript. I...
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Netmag
During Brighton’s Digital Festival, I ran 2 Hackasaurus workshops in local schools for students aged between 13 and 15. I did this with Aral Balkan who taught the concepts of programming using Scratch. The workshops I ran taught how to...
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At the moment I’m in Toronto visiting Mozilla’s new offices and helping with a Hackasaurus sprint. This week we’re concentrating on games as a code learning experience, and had a group of kids aged between around 8 to 11 in...
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A development version of Adobe Edge came out today, and I thought I’d give it a quick play to see whether it would be useful for any of the projects I’m working on. I’m trying to keep an open mind...
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I ran my first UK Hackasaurus workshop on Friday at the University of Birmingham for the Computing at School teacher conference. Most of the attendees were IT teachers from secondary/high schools, and the session was designed to be adapted by...
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A few weeks ago I got a call saying I'd won a competition to attend Google's Zeitgeist conference. I'd submitted a 1-minute video for the talking about Scrunchup for a Young Minds contest, and it had been picked for the...
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This week I’ve been planning Hackasaurus workshop venues. I’ve been looking for IT suites in schools and libraries where I can hold hour long workshops teaching kids how to remix the web using the Hackasaurus tools such as the X-Ray...
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Since launching Scrunchup back in 2009, I've been looking for a way to incorporate my love of web development with my passion for improving the state of web education. When Matt Thompson asked if I'd like to work with Mozilla...
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In a couple of weeks, everyone in Britain will be taking a day off work to heartily celebrate The Royal Wedding. People in other countries will be celebrating too because the Royal Family is absolutely marvellous. To get the most...
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I first heard about SXSW Interactive on the Boagworld podcast when I was 16. Paul and Marcus interviewed some people while they were there for the show, and I thought it’d be pretty cool to go one day. I’ve had...
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Way back in November, I got an email from a magazine saying I’d been recommended for an interview. As I skim-read the message on my phone, I assumed it was for a job. Although, I thought it was a bit...
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Today I attended a Think Tank organised by Naace. We were discussing the curriculum review, and ICT's role in education. I was invited along after Naace picked up on the blog post I wrote; Help keep ICT in our schools....
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A couple of weeks ago I was encouraged by Jeremy Keith to put some rel values on links in my website, so I read up on them to find out when it's appropriate to use them. I was particularly interested...
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The audio for my talk at Heart and Sole has been published. I spoke about starting out in the industry, discussing my experience of setting up, and some of the mistakes I made along the way. I also talk about...
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If we believe children should be taught to write as well as to read, they should learn to program as well as to use ICT — NAACE’s Response to the Royal Society’s Call for Evidence on Computing in Schools Photo...
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Last Friday, I had to confront two of my biggest fears simultaneously; public speaking and heights. The title slide for my talk I was giving a talk at Heart and Sole, an evening event at Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower, about starting...
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Before I got so into web design, I used to write a lot of music. I’d often churn out about 5 to 10 pieces of music a week. I don’t have a lot of it left, but when I really...
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A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at London Web Standards on Web Education. It’s a topic that’s very close to my heart and I’m trying to spread the word about how poor the teaching of web design...
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The public beta of IE9 comes out in a few days, so this is a good time to check the lovely CSS3 transforms, border-radii and box-shadows you’ve added to your CSS files are future-proof. Browsers like Firefox and Safari require...
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I was messing around with making buttons in CSS and thought I’d share the code I wrote. I discovered that using an inset shadow gives the button a little glow on the top. Nifty button Old and feeble browsers will...
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2 years ago, almost to the day, I left school and registered as a sole trader. I’d been unsuccessful in finding anywhere that would give me a job due to lack of experience, and the recession had just reared its...
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On the 19th of May, I gave a talk at Carsonified’s Future of Web Design London on Freelancing. I’ve just been sent the video of my talk if you missed it. – Video no longer available. :( Photo by Marc...
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On Saturday, inspired by Paul Annett’s Channel 4 logo, I decided to build a parallax illusion in the browser. Here’s the end result: https://maban.co.uk/sandbox/parallax-illusion/ How it works To build this you only need 2 images. One is the stripes (mine...
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Government and political party websites are some of the worst designed out there, which is a shame because they often have a lot of important information to communicate. Last year we saw how a strong online presence so positively benefited...
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Here’s a picture someone drew when the supply teacher we were assigned that day entered the classroom and announced “Funtime is over.” Today, while doing a bit of sorting through old stuff, I stumbled across some pages from notebooks I’d...
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If you’re like me, you always feel a twinge of guilt when sending an invoice to a client. It’s not that you feel you’ve done a bad job, you just find it hard to ask for money, especially when it’s...
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I’ve had a few people ask me for the recipe of the chocolate cake I made for the 200th Boagworld. I wasn’t going to post this on my blog because it’s not really about web design, but to justify that,...
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I’ve been looking a lot at the use of colours in physical objects recently. Often you’re asked to work on a site where the brand colours are some hideous combination of yellow and blue or red and green, and you’re...
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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...
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At Barcamp London 7, I gave a presentation on some CSS tricks I learnt while building Scrunchup. I’m planning on doing a full write-up for an upcoming issue of Scrunchup.
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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...
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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...
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So this is what happens if the content in some blocks is longer than others. Yeugh. 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...
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Yesterday, I gave a talk at a web conference called Tomorrow’s Web. I gave a summary of some of the conference talks here. The reason I did this talk is because I am concerned that young web designers and developers...
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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,...
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Trying to explain to old school friends what I do. I'm a front end developer... I make, like, websites... fuck it, I'm an astronaut.— Anna Debenham (@anna_debenham) June 19, 2009 Whenever I am asked what I do by someone who...
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I’ve been rebuilding my site in HTML5 as a practice run for future projects to see what problems I come across. When I tested my site in IE, I noticed all the elements that the browser didn’t recognise were not...
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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...
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I’ve just been interviewed for Techettes, a site for tech savvy girls. You can see my interview here https://techettes.com/2009/07/interview-with-tomorrows-web-speaker-anna-debenham/
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Chessbrook is the second school I have worked with. It was a really great project to work on because it was quite challenging. The school is an education centre for students who have not been able to cope in mainstream...
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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...
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I worked on the HTML and CSS for Clearleft’s dConstruct 2009 website, using microformats to mark up the schedules and locations. The navigation was a bit of a challenge. The selected state was quite fiddly to develop because I wanted...
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The Portland Arms pub website was commissioned 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 with his perspective of life...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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: https://news.bbc.co.uk… I would not want...
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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…...
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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...
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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...
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St Albans Girls school is my secondary school. While I was studying there, I wrote to them asking whether they would consider a redesign of their website, which they agreed to. The old website was ‘not fit for purpose’ as...
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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. So the...
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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....
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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...
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A few months ago, I was asked by the head of the Spanish department at my school whether I could make a preloader for some Flash audio lessons he’d made. I guess word must have got round the staff room...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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