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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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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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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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Bonekickers
If you didn’t watch Bonekickers then OMG, you missed one of the most appalling shows ever made. It was ace in all the wrong ways. But that sounds as if I’m recommending it… I’m not, I’m really not. It was basically the Da Vinci Code, but less intelligent and not as well written. *snort* Shame really as it was by the Life on Mars folks. (NB. The BF refers to Bonekickers as “Life on Uranus”) From BBC comments site for Bonekickers. “Well, if you get rid of the pathetic writers, the appalling actors, put it on another channel and give it a different name they might just be able to rescue…
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How the Internet ruined the Doctor Who series 4 finale for it’s own biggest fans
This pretty much applies to any fandom, it’s just Who that’s brought it into sharp focus. For weeks and months leading up the finale, on fan sites up and down the land (and overseas) fans were watching and speculating and thinking, thinking, thinking. Puts “clues” together and forcing pieces to fit into patterns. We (yep, I’m definitely one of them) were thousands strong and one person’s dumb theory gave a gem of an idea to someone else, and that person’s theory may have been dumb too but they passed on a little more to someone else. Thousands of us, plotting and coming up with fantastical ideas that required no budget,…
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On Disclaimers in Fanfic
On the issue of disclaimers: I’ve always put one on but for me it’s never really been about trying to give myself some legal protection (since it was obvious that the protection it might afford is really dubious anyway). The impetus which makes me write fanfic has always come from a deep respect for the work itself and for the people who originally created it. I can stand in front of any actor you like and my knees will not knock (yep, even our Mr Marsters) but put me in front of a writer and watch my brain melt out of my ears! Joss Whedon. I totally froze. Stephen Moffat.…
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Never Been Jossed
The term “Jossed” (jossed, jossing, joss) was named for Joss Whedon, creator of the popular television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. The term is generally used by fan fiction writers when these shows chose to go in a direction that contradicted the story the fanfiction writer was currently working on. For instance, someone writing fanfiction on how to bring back a character from the dead might be jossed when the actual event happened, in a different way, in seatson six. Wikipedia I love the term “Jossed”, but personally, I find it largely redundant. I’ve always accepted that most of my fanfic will be AU from the moment…
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Fanfic and re-mixing
Note: To any authors who would care enough to be bothered to remix my fanfic or write sequels or anything like that. Please, let me know about it. Even if I disliked your work or your take on my take of someone else’s world, I’d probably still be interested to see what you came up with. In fact, I’d probably want to link to your work from my site (although I’ll reserve the right to make snarky comments along with the link if I don’t agree with your vision of my vision. *wink*). I also reserve the right not to like your re-mix/sequel. I reserve the right to hate it…
