Domain names cost the equivalent of a Starbucks coffee

UK-based domain names (yourorganisation.co.uk or .org.uk) usually cost somewhere between £3 and £5 per year. Once you own a domain name, you can use free forwarding systems to set up a custom email address (you@yourorganisation.co.uk) with your existing inbox. It takes a few minutes and costs about the same as a gingerbread latte.

Popular low-cost domain providers include:

• 1 and 1 »
• 123-reg »

Web hosts provide webmail options

If you own a domain name and use a web host to keep a website, you will almost definitely have webmail options. Even the most basic hosting packages tend to allow about five email accounts.

The web hosting services I provide allow an unlimited number of email addresses, including options for forwarding and alias support.

How I handle my mail

I use Google Apps to handle my email. Google provide free services for small- to medium-sized organisations, using their Gmail interface for custom domains. Google Apps also enables calendars, contact books, docs, and other collaborative office tools for accounts on the system. This means that you can share contacts between individuals in your organisation or work together on documents. I offer Google Apps setup and support for each site I host.

1. Rounded corners on subheadings

Users with modern browsers will be enjoying softer edges on the various subheadings around the site. This improvement is purely aesthetic, making the layout a bit less harsh and making the subheadings a bit more tab-like.

2. Link to RSS Feed in header

I did not include a link to the site’s RSS feed in the original design. I reasoned that

• Hardly anyone uses RSS (although I love it);
• Those who want to can find feeds through their feed readers;
• The feed can be accessed at gledhillonline.co.uk/feed, or gledhillonline.co.uk/rss, to name but two easy-to-find urls;
• Those who don’t know what RSS is are put off by confusing links and logos splashed around websites.

On balance, I think I was wrong in that judgement. RSS is an exceptionally useful way of keeping up-to-date with websites, which is why I use it so much every day. Although people can find your feeds by other means, it is folly to go out of your way to make it hard for them. So, a link to the RSS feed now sits where you might expect to find it in the header, while not cluttering up the sidebar.

3. Roman numerals in the copyright declaration

It is important to keep your footer fresh with an up-to-date copyright declaration. (A while ago, I wrote a tutorial on how to display the current year in the footer of your website.) Recently, though, I have been thinking that footers could be more visually interesting. Many WordPress themes now support widgets in the footer, which can work if executed properly. For my purposes, I just wanted to do something visually interesting in the footer.

Roman numerals in the footer of Gledhill Online

I have also used Roman numerals in the same way on my personal blog, using a serif typeface and more detailed copyright text.

I opted to display the current year in oversized Roman numerals. True to form, this uses a PHP script to get the current year and convert it to Roman numerals. It adds a distinct touch to the footer, which I think works quite well.

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.

The advice: ‘The background is too dark’.
My reaction: It’s meant to be dark, that’s the design!
The lesson: If your website is uncomfortable to read, people will not bother trying to read it.

The advice: ‘There aren’t any pictures’.
My reaction: It’s a collection of writing, it doesn’t need any pictures.
The lesson: If your website is boring to look at, people will think your content is going to be boring, too. A good use of typography and whitespace is essential, but some visuals cannot hurt.

The advice: ‘I couldn’t find X’.
My reaction: You’re useless! It’s at the bottom of that page, under that heading, after you’ve picked that option! How could you not find it?
The lesson: Your site structure might make absolute sense to you, but someone visiting it for the first time has not seen your wireframes and hierarchy diagrams. Be patient, and make everything as obvious as possible.

The advice: ‘I like it, but I wish I could do X’.
My reaction: If I wanted you to be able to do X, I would have made it so that you could do X!
The lesson: If your visitors think that your website is missing features, take the time to see if they are correct. If not, ask yourself why they thought you might offer those features. Nine times out of ten, people want more or irrelevant features because the purpose of your website is not as clear as it should be.

The Website

A screenshot of the Hire Dudgeon demo site

The system uses PHP and MySQL to do all the heavy lifting. The front end uses a bit of jQuery and JavaScript as well as HTML and CSS to keep it all together. The site uses some CSS3 features which visitors with modern browsers will benefit from.

Hire Dudgeon contains several features which work together to provide just the desired functionality; nothing more, nothing less:

• A content management system for the database of equipment;
• A user registration and membership system, including additional support for administrators;
• A booking system for ordering equipment;
• Automatic invoicing;
• Tracking information for system administrators;
• Clean, quick code and simple UI;
• A full documentation booklet.

The full site will go live after the busy University examination period is over, but a working demo site can be found on this website in the meantime. Watch this space for more information on the official site, coming soon.

Browse the demo »

Little Greyie is my favourite teddy - can you guess how I chose his name?

Love is supposed to wear out your fur a little

The more you cuddle your teddy, the thinner its fur will become. The label will begin to fade and the stitching might come loose. It is like a well-thumbed book: it shows how often it has been used and enjoyed. If you blog for a long time, you will find your it gets a bit tired from time to time. That’s a natural consequence of regular use, just like your teddy’s worn-out fur. It is always good to revitalise your blog from time to time, but don’t ever lose its character. It is worn where you have used it the most, and that is not always a bad thing.

It’s okay to let your inside stuffing show now and then

Whichever style of blog you keep, it’s important to remember that it is a social medium. That means that it is not just OK to be yourself, but that it actually works best if you bring your character to the web page. The more you squeeze and cuddle your teddy, the more stuffing begins to pop out from the seams – from time to time you might find yourself exposed by your blogging. Never over-indulge, and never do anything online which you do not feel comfortable about. But do feel free to let your stuffing show every now and then.

Listening is as important as talking

Teddies are so popular for children because they are incredibly reliable friends. They always seem to know what we are thinking (mainly because we have anthropomorphised them and transmitted our emotions onto them). Teddies are fantastic listeners: a shoulder to cry on when we are upset; a friend to hold on to when we feel unwell; a mate to play with. Listening is as important to blogging as talking is. Assuming you have more than one reader, more people are listening to your blog than talking through it. They are like teddies, largely silent but indispensably useful to us. If they leave a comment, you have the opportunity to reverse the roles for a while and listen to them. Truly great social networks flourish when people learn from their teddies and listen well.

1. You will see that designing less is best

Grab a notepad and a pen, write down the list of features you have planned for an upcoming application, and see what you can cut in 60 seconds. Draw a line through each feature you can cut without completely destroying the application.

The goal is to leave youreself with only what is most essential for the application to serve its purpose.

Bells? Gone.

Whistles? Gone.

Show me only the pieces you absolutely have to keep for the tool to do its job.

2. You will see why mental models matter more than reality

For users to feel good about an application, they need to feel as if they understand it. Making it as simple as possible for them to understand – even if that simple understanding is completely inaccurate – is designing the obvious. Of course, the inaccurate understanding has to be useful as a way of thinking and simplifying, but as long as that’s true, the design has a better chance of succeeding.

In other words, it’s OK if the user is completely wrong in her perception of what is happening as long as her sense of understanding makes her feel good and competent, and she can accomplish her goals with her understanding, regardless of how faulty it is.

3. You will see how to prevent errors from ever happening

Poka-yoke (pronounced POH-kah YOH-kay) is the Japanese term for “mistake-proofing”. A poke-yoke device is whatever is used to prevent an error. It’s what makes something foolproof…

The remote for my car locks all the doors at once so I don’t have to wonder if I left any unlocked. My car has a little plastic strip that tethers the gas cap to the car, so I won’t accidentally leave it on my trunk and drive off without it properly attached. The keys can’t be removed from the ignition unless the engine has been turned off. And I can’t put the transmission in reverse unless I’m at a complete stop…

Poke-yoke devices are everywhere.

Sadly, they don’t show up on the Web nearly as often as they should. When the do, though, it’s fantastic. Users can get things done without incident. Things go smoothly. You know, the way things should go.

“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.

One minute and 7 tiny lines of code later, I had made my first web page.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
</body>
</html>

By the end of that lunch break I had created a couple of pages and linked them together. By the end of the term, I had made something resembling the academic-style portals from the late 1980s. Within the year, I was using Blogger to run a website for the school’s debating society.

I am so grateful for Benedict’s computer club. I began to learn HTML out of pure curiosity and I have kept that inquisitive mindset of youth ever since. The joy of scripting is that you will keep discovering new things and inventing new ways of doing things. That might seem frightening, but it is actually endlessly encouraging. It means I can keep exploring, always asking the next “what about…?” question.

I may have learned how to make a basic web page that afternoon, but the bigger lesson was that my assumptions about programming were totally wrong. I expected it to be impossibly difficult and dull. In reality, it has trained me in several important disciplines and remains extremely rewarding (especially when problem-solving). Not everybody will become an expert in HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, JQuery, or whatever poison suits you, but most people would have a good time if they had a crack at a bit of basic scripting. I’m glad I made the most of the opportunity I had to do just that.

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 »