New Adventures in Web Design conference

Posted in on 29 July 2010 | Comments

I’m always on the look-out for good value web design conferences with great speakers and New Adventures in Web Design in Nottingham in January 2011 satisfies both those criteria. It looked so good when I first heard about it that I ignored my usual procrastination(!) and booked straight away.

The conference has been organised by Simon Collison who has attracted a range of big name speakers and put together what looks like a fast-paced schedule that includes two discussion slots. I’m really looking forward to it.

If you are attending the conference, I hope to see you there!

Double Bubbles for wedding balloons

Posted in on 20 July 2010 | Comments

Double Bubbles screenshot Here’s a new website that we launched recently. Double Bubbles is a wedding balloon display and table decoration company based in Horsham, West Sussex. They asked us to modernise the website and improves search engine positions for specific search terms whilst retaining the current logo.

It’s sometime quite difficult to achieve good search engine positions when the number of website pages is small. In these cases, I think the best approach is to concentrate on the core search terms and local searches at the start. Once you get good positions for these, you can do more work to get exposure for a wider range of search terms.

Even if the website is small, I strongly believe that recoding to use modern layout methods (CSS not tables for layout) and better code structure/semantics will also be beneficial for search engine positions.

London Web Standards Group meet-up

Posted in on 13 July 2010 | Comments

Yesterday evening, I attended a London Web Standards Group meeting which was a Q and A with Andy Budd about UX. The meeting took place in a pub called the The Square Pig and about 40-50 people turned up.

It’s the first time I have been to this group’s meetings and I really enjoyed it. The Q and A was good and everything was very informal. Before and after the Q and A, I had some interesting chats with a few folks including David Powers, Rob Enslin, Andy Budd, Rupert Bowman, and Romily Jones. Many thanks to Jeff Van Campen for chairing the meeting.

If you are interested in web standards and talking with other developers/designers, I strongly recommend the meetings. I am planning to go again. Might see you there!

Update: Here are the slides from the meeting (including the questions) and another write-up. Steve Workman has summarised the questions and answers (and with nice sketch notes as well!)

Getting started with Facebook pages for business

Posted in on 11 July 2010 | Comments [2]

Like many other folks, I have a Facebook account which I use for personal friends (and only friends). However, I have never used Facebook for business reasons until fairly recently. A few weeks ago, I was asked if I could create a Facebook page for a business and, whilst I’m sure I could do this, I had to be honest with the potential client and say that I’d never actually done this before. With some spare time last weekend, I thought I’d create my own business (page) on Facebook. I should be in a better position to advise clients if I have actually done it myself! Here’s what I have done so far and a few beginner tips.

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Links for light reading 30-6-10

Posted in on 30 June 2010 | Comments [1]

Here are a few links from around the web that I have spotted recently:

  • If you ever receive spreadsheet data from a client and get asked to ‘just add this to our website’, you might be interested in Tableizer which converts spreadsheet data to HTML tables.
  • Have fun with borders is a simple tutorial that exemplifies some nice CSS border styles.
  • Bounce is a new web app for giving quick feedback on a web page. It’s a great way of sharing comments on a website! Here’s an example I made earlier.
  • Test your website before launch with Launchlist.
  • Meaningful Mark-up: Posh and Beyond is an excellent article on semantic mark-up and the benefits for you and your clients.

Quite a diverse list I think you’ll agree…!


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