I am currently evaluating our interior decoration and on my quest to see whats new and whats happening out there, I came across the coolhunter website. Its rapidly turned into a great source of inspiration, not just for my current project, but for those times when you need a little something to trigger an idea. It showcases just about every creative medium you could imagine, from packaging to art, gadgets, fashion and much more. Definitely my ‘find of the month’…
With so many web agencies and programmers claiming their websites are 100% compilant with current standards there was no real fun way to measure it (unless you run the W3C validator). Now there is.
A web site has just been launched called xhtmlchallenge.com. The premise is very simple and very clever.
Just add your URL and a competitiors site URL and off you go. The site will check your sites Doctype, Markup Validation, Content length, Markup Ratio, Content Ratio and CSS Validation.
The site also allows users to vote on which site they think is the best.
There are few websites out there that could claim your point of entry to the web - that all important default home page. The BBC is taking a step in the right direction this week, with a little help with some AJAX, to allow you to customize your own BBC home page.
It’s a big step and an important one for the British Broadcasters and I am sure they will get some converts. I am a big fan of the BBC and think I get excellent value for my licence fee (feel free to throw tomatoes at me). They won’t convince me to change my home page though as it doesn’t give me enough immediate access to the web - I still need Google.
With this move though, they could allow widgets for even more customization in the future.
So, although I won’t shift from my iGoogle page, I will be moving things around on my very own BBC homepage for those visits I do make.
They’ve even got it to validate. Makes me want to stick my chest out.
I am not a massive fan of Flash, mainly because I produce marketing websites that need to be found.
I think the raft of websites that use Flash badly has also driven me away from the technology.
That said, there is definitely a place for it and, when it’s done well, it’s bloody good - like the portfolio navigation on Whitevoid.
What would you do if you managed to get hold of 1001 different fonts? I can imagine the ‘designers’ of parish magazines, etc. will end up with a right eyeful in terms of trying to use every single one in a single publication.
For all you designers though that understand a good use of a typeface, you may enjoy this resource of 1001 free fonts.
As an aside, isn’t it interesting that moving away from the Adobe / Linotype / Monotype model where you pay for families, you can actually get some stuff for absolutely zero? Who said the internet doesn’t change the rules?
I have had a great time this week putting live a new website for Magic Mitre, partly because I persuaded the client to create some top tip videos.
Basically, the client sells a unique patented DIY product. This currently sells heavily in the UK and US but in different ways. IE. IN the UK, you can buy it online, in the US they sell via QVC.
There is also the issue of terms and translation - miter vs. mitre being the main difference but also coving & crown molding; skirting board & baseboard; dado rail & chair rail, etc.
This led to two sites - with clarified content for each market, using Webmaster tools to defined the location of the .com website. Google now knows the .com is for North America and the .co.uk is for the UK.
The structure also allows for scalability for future international growth (the French version should be up in the next few months).
The videos cost next to nothing to produce but they do what they need to on the Magic Mitre You Tube Channel. These also feed into the top tips section.
Why not check it out, whether your are English looking to cut mitre joints, or American looking to cut miter joints.
Relate is a national charity that works to promote healthy relationships. With regional offices, we have recently launched a new site for the joint office of Basingstoke & Aldershot Relate.
The site is a simple static site with a news feed from Wordpress.
I was looking for a mug manufacturer the other day, a manufacturer mind you, not a reseller, not a distributor. So I entered in my search criteria of “earthenware mug manufacturer” and up popped the list. The first one listed after the sponsored links was this useless site which quite amazingly does not contain a contact number, email address or form across the entire site.
What a waste of time.
We have just launched two new websites this week.
Talk Seminars is an update that uses our new CMS solution. This means that the admin team at Talk Forty Four can create their own events, add forms and update their news feeds from an easy to use control panel.
Use Your Noggin - Another redesigned, static website for marketing. The Blog is still being worked on (live next week) and we will be transferring this to Wordpress, SEO’d and social networked to the max.
Daryll just called me, very excited, to tell me they’ve had a new lead already on the first day.
In the modern world of web standards there is no room for the poor implementation of javascript that had swept the web during the days of ‘Ive got a dodgy copy of Dreamweaver, and now I am web designer’, which led to the increase of Dynamic HTML download sites that allowed web masters to copy and paste code into there websites to make text fade in and out and scroll (The best ones where always the big clocks following the mouse around. Superb! I am as guilty as the next programmer).
When it seemed every mickey mouse website was a mixture of animated gifs and random fading text that made you feel that you where on some kind of acid trip. Javascript then entered as Obi Wan would call it the “Dark Times” everything went back to being basic or to the overuse of bad Tweening in Flash.
Javascript has recently gone through some kind of resurgence of late with the emphasis being on “unobstrusive javascript”. What’s this? I hear you cry.
Well, if you were to think of a website as a cake (nicked this analogy from Gaz and Keith): The base of the cake would be your HTML. If you want it to taste nice then it needs to be made correctly using the right ingredients. This means semantic markup using tags that are relevant to the content i.e. using <UL> tags for lists and <DL> for definiton lists, headings in the right place and all that jazz.
When you have finished with your base and you’re happy all the ingredients are there, you can then begin to decorate the cake. Decorating the cake in this case would mean using CSS to apply styles, colours and the general design giving you something that not only tastes good but looks fantastic.
Now this in itself would be enough for 9/10 web programmers / designers. However, we could go really overboard and add a cherry. The cherry, as the title of this article would suggest, is Javascript.
Using the ingredients in place we can add the cherry to enhance the cake and make it look that little bit sexier. The beauty of adding the cherry at the end is if no one likes the cherry (i.e. if the visitor to your website has javascript turned off) then they can take it off and crack on with the rest of the cake.
There is nothing worse than taking the cherry off and finding the whole cake crumbles in to mush because the cake was reliant on the cherry holding it all together.
So in summary where am I going with this?
I am a stickler for web standards although alot of other people out there may not be and there is nothing worse than coming across a web site that relies on the end-user having Javascript or indeed Flash installed to view the content.
Javascript and Flash should be layered on top of the content of a web site to sex it up or to make the end user’s experience more enjoyable.