I frequently see commercial vans, letterheads and business cards adorned with non-custom email addresses. my_company_name@leading_broadband_provider.co.uk looks unprofessional because anybody contacting your organisation will rightly conclude that they could set that up themselves in five minutes. It looks like you just haven’t bothered. And why not make the effort when it is very quick and very cheap to set up a custom, professional email address. Continue reading »

I want every website I make to be fantastic before it goes live. But over time, the more I see them in action and the more people use them, the more I notice things which could be improved. Little tweaks, small enough that few people would notice the difference, can make a big difference. I blogged recently about the need to review your website and the need to take as much advice as possible: here are three minor changes I have recently made to the Game On theme here at Gledhill Online as a result of some advice and a review process. Continue reading »

GK Chesterton once said he owed his success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite. That is often how webmasters and web developers can feel about the ‘advice’ they get from others. They just don’t understand what they are taking about, or what would they know about web design, they’ve probably never even heard of Dreamweaver! These responses are all too common, but that does not excuse their folly. Here’s my piece of advice: The less someone knows about making websites, the more helpful their advice is because they will see things you never will.

Here are some bits of constructive criticism I have received over the years, how I initially reacted to it, and how I eventually learned from it. Continue reading »

Hire Dudgeon is a custom equipment booking system I have designed and developed for Collingwood JCR Technical Services. It allows clients to browse and book kit which is available for hire, and in turn enables the administrators to keep track of items. Continue reading »

It is a universal truth that, however many cuddly toys they may have owned, everyone had a favourite teddy. You know the one I mean. It was probably the tattiest toy you owned. You will have taken it everywhere you went. If you got dirty, it got dirty. Even now, you smile when you think about it. That teddy has a lot to teach you about blogging. Continue reading »

Robert Hoekman, Jr.’s book is a must-read for anyone designing web applications, but it is also a great read for those involved in other stages of the web development process. Hoekman Jr. sets out the guiding principles of great web application design (read: simplicity) with the kind of persuasive force that will have you shouting “Yes!” at the book on almost every page. By the way of three quotes, here are three reasons to buy this book and read it and re-read and so on. Continue reading »

It all started one lunchtime while I as at school. I had gone to the computer room to print some documents but found myself in the middle of a computer club. A 6th Former called Benedict had just started a lunchtime club for people who wanted to learn how to make websites. (6th Formers seemed like giants back in those days. Now they look about 10.) I had not paid much attention to the notices in assembly: if anything, I supposed that writing code would require graduate-level skills in mathematics and would be incompatible with a thriving social life.

“Save the file as index.html and open it in the web browser. And there it is, your first website!” A website? Just like that? I had to have a go. Continue reading »

You don’t need to know everything. As with any field, there’s a lot you could learn about usability. But unless you’re a usability professional, there’s a limit to how much is useful to learn.

I’ve always liked the passage in A Study in Scarlet where Dr. Watson is shocked to learn that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know that the earth travels around the sun. Given the finite capacity of the human brain, Holmes explains, he cannot afford to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones:

What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Steve Krug, Don’t Make me Think, 2nd ed. page 6.

Read my review »