It’s been quiet round these parts for the last couple of years. No particular reason why. Someone said I should write up my experience of leading the redevelopment of the Open University online student Help Centre. This feels like a good place to do it. Over the next few months I plan to cover managing […]
Here’s a real scenario. I went to the dentist the other day for my annual check up. Whilst paying the fee, the receptionist offered to set up my next appointment. “Can you do 3pm on the 26th April next year?” she asked. I pulled out my mobile phone, a Nokia e72, and fired up Opera […]
The 20th of January is almost two months ago now and yet I’m only just getting around to jotting down my thoughts on Simon Collison’s inaugural New Adventures conference. My excuse is that on the day itself and indeed the month leading up to, and the month following the conference, I had a terrible chest […]
Ah, blogging, I remember you. Casting my mind back to 2002 I can vaguely remember finding it utterly magical that I could self-publish. Inspired by the likes of Owen Briggs, Eric Costello and web behemoth Jeffery Zeldman I not only fine-tuned my web standards skills but also felt compelled to keep the general public fully […]
I’ve had a fair amount of exposure to Drupal over the last year or so as my employer has embraced it as our web content management system of choice. One thing that has always frustrated me is the steep learning curve and non-intuitive user experience. Drupal 7, released today, strives to fix all that. Facilitated […]
Mark Boulton’s Five Simple Steps: A practical guide to designing for the web has to be my favourite web design book of the year. One of the many things I really love about it is the personalised anecdotal style applied throughout. It’s the kind of book that will age gracefully as it doesn’t dwell too […]
The edweb09 workshop was held over two days, 14-15th May 2009 and was facilitated by Headscape, a web development company based in Hampshire, UK. The workshop was aimed at those web managers working in the UK higher education sector and covered four distinct topics: usability, accessibility, content management systems and writing for the web. I was lucky […]
Professional photographers get pretty annoyed when their photos appear on third-party sites without their permission despite this being the default behaviour of the Flickr API.
Dan Wellman’s book jQuery UI 1.6 (ISBN 978-1-847195-12-8) from Packt Publishing is the kind of book I wish I had when I first started tinkering with jQuery. Firstly, I’m a web designer, not a developer. Scripting scares me. I’m really out of my comfort zone when I need to bring a web page to life […]
A lot of web designers, myself included, are mostly concerned with the way things look when people visit the web sites we create. We’re all about the design — layout, typography, colour, graphics and how they enhance the user experience. We start with some sketches, do some wire-frames and rapidly move into software like Photoshop […]