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10 Common Website Mistakes
1. Thinking of your website as a brochure. It seems like it should be a good metaphor, but a website is fundamentally not the same as a brochure. Brochures are flat, linearly read objects. Websites don’t need to be flat and certainly aren’t read linearly. Thinking of your site as brochure stops you from understanding the power having your own website gives you and it can encourage you to have the wrong approach towards keeping it updated. Brochures are designed, finalised and then printed. They become unchangeable at a certain point. Websites are never really “finished”. It’s not just that they can change, in my experience, they will change. They…
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One Team: Bringing Design and Development Together
Every six months or so, I see an article like the one linked below and it’s getting incredibly frustrating to see the exact same platitudes said over and over again. 6 ways designers and developers can work together better The article is about the difficulties of getting designers and developers to work together and what to do about it. The advice is mostly telling people to trust and talk to each other more. Well, yeah. That sounds like a good place to start, but are we really just still starting? This could have been a post about software tools to help collaboration between designers and developers. It could have been…
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Windows Desktop Customisation – 5 Cool Applications
I’ve always loved customising my computer’s desktop. It’s not enough for me to change the background picture and few colours. I use a variety of tools to help me. So my first application – to create a new baseline interface – is Classic Shell. Classic Shell – Free (including for commercial use) This program puts a skin over Windows 8 and gives you back some of the features of the old Windows desktop. It loads on startup, so you go straight into a familiar style of desktop and bypass the Metro style altogether. All the good new stuff of the OS is still accessible (you can easily get to all the…
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What happens to your website if you die?
What might happen to your web site when you die is something most people probably haven’t thought about. Despite the language often used about ‘buying’ a domain name, you don’t actually own it in the sense you would own a piece of land. It’s more like renting it on a short or long lease from a domain registrar. If no one has gone into your account to renew it, the lease will expire and the property will go back onto the open market to be rented by someone else (90 days after the expiry date). With your web hosting, as an individual, your contract may come to an end with…
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100% Guaranteed Way to get Likes on Facebook
I have discovered the ultimate way to get a ton of likes on Facebook! Get a kitten. Post a picture of it sleeping. Seriously, the most liked thing I’ve ever posted. 😉 See also A Kitten Called Thing
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Your website is not a brochure.
In my post on responsive design one of the underlying themes was that modern web designers have been, and still are, held back by models coming from old media. The use of the term “brochure website” is another one of these unhelpful old tropes. It fails to articulate that a website is a thing in its own right. You don’t need to add the term “brochure” to it. When you do that you make a site less than it is capable of being by pigeonholing it into an older model of media interaction. A website is not a brochure. It is a website, which is a totally different thing on…
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The Humble Hyperlink
I’m a web designer. I drool over designs of websites and dream in CSS. I’m a developer. I love code that does awesome things. I love tying the two together and making beautiful things that do great stuff. But at the end of the day my favourite thing about the web isn’t the pretty sites or the funky coding, it’s the humble hyperlink. I saw my first site when the pages were grey and there was no funky code or beautiful design. I fell in love with the World Wide Web for one basic element of its underlying design: the ability to make connections. The other day I read an…
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Web Design has always been responsive
The hottest buzz term in the web design industry right now has to be Responsive Design. Article after article describes it as an enormous shift in the web cosmos that changes everything (!) I believe that this is web design illiteracy and a product of a vast misstep in how many people have gone about designing websites in the past. Seeing the principle of Responsive Design as something alien and weird is a mindset that’s coming from a very narrow view of what the web is and how to design sites for it. It’s actually easy to see how that narrow view developed over time and became the mainstream view.…
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Organise Your IPad With 3 Home Screens
I love the simplicty of the apps display on my iPad. It’s unfussy and simple enough for a child to use, but straightforward and unfussy can also mean incredibly cluttered when you have a lot of apps. So how can you keep it unfussy but also efficiently organised? I tried searching for efficient methods for organising the apps, but all I found were articles telling me physically how to customise it using the inbuilt tools or offering really vague advice, like review them regularly to keep the numbers down. So I came up with my own system that seems to work well, and in a communal spirit I’ve decided to…
