New Adventures in Web Design conference

Posted in on 29 July 2010 | Comments [2]

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!)

Create your own iPhone app quickly and easily

Posted in on 4 January 2010 | Comments

The growth of the iPhone app store and market has been phenomenal in recent years. Many websites and blogs have developed their own iPhone applications as a way of promoting their brand. One recent example of this was the Guardian newspaper in the UK with its own Guardian iPhone app. Quite a smart way of leveraging the newspaper’s online content I think.

Up to now, you needed to have some development experience and you had to navigate your way through the Apple app development process before creating and (possibly) selling your app. However, AppMakr is a new website that promises to make iPhone app development easy, fast, and inexpensive. If you have website content and an RSS feed, AppMakr makes it straightforward to create an iPhone app for a low price (from $199). I viewed their demo movie and it all looks very easy!

This is one of those (rare) websites that has really made me sit up and say Wow!

Related: Want to optimise your website for iPhones using the traditional CSS route? Try iPhone CSS—tips for building iPhone websites

Plans for this blog in 2010?

Posted in on 14 December 2009 | Comments

I have been thinking about what I might do with this blog next year because I want to do something that would be (for me) a bit different. I have been wanting to redesign for a while and here’s an idea that I am considering.

Firstly, I’d quite like to strip the style sheet down to a more slimline version of what I have now. Over the years, I have added more to the style sheet without removing or redefining the style sheet ‘fluff’ as much as I could have. As a result, I feel that it is becoming a bit bloated with style rules that are no longer used… or that are not used as optimally as they might be.

Secondly, I would like to try out new styles so my plan would be to create a new style for the blog every month. The basic HTML would remain the same or similar with each iteration but the style sheet would change 12 times over the year. I am not sure I can keep this up for the whole year, or even how different the styles will be, but it sounds like an interesting thing to do and it might encourage me to experiment a bit more.

My initial idea would be to start with a base style sheet and modify this throughout the year. Perhaps Andy Clarke’s universal IE6 style sheet would be a starting point? It was designed for a different purpose but has a core set of typographical styles that could be a good ‘baseline’.

I will not be going so far as to create a new style for every blog post but I figure that once a month might be possible. Anyway, before I decide whether to do this, let me know if you have any thoughts or comments. All ideas or feedback considered.


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