"announcement" in Weblog

This redesign has been 18 months coming. I did the original design over Christmas 2004 but I just couldn’t find the time to follow it through. Since then the design has been through several revisions, getting simpler each time. This version is the product of an anti-shadow and -gradient phase I was going through about 6 months ago, when all the shiny new Web 2.0 sites were coming out. I’ve mellowed a bit since then… I also really wanted to see a return for natural textures. They’ve fallen from grace since their heyday, back about 4 years, on sites like DNA (now redesigned) and the Hayward Gallery.

For the IA and information design I have experimented with a couple of ideas: zooming content and weighted navigation.

Zooming content, which I’ll write up properly another time, is basically content becomming more general as you scroll down the page. This gives easy and intuitive access to recent posts but makes the pages very dense and limits access to older content. To try and balance this I have experimented with the function of search. It’s normally an afterthought, consigned to the top right corner where everyone can find it but no one is encouraged to use it. With this design I wanted to try bringing search to the forefront of my navigation so it’s given pride of place in the dead center, right next to the primary navigation. This random access navigation is is supported by a fairly standard taxonomy, as well as more granular tagging. I still have about 200-odd posts to tag and perhaps 350 to categorise but I’ll be getting on with that behind the scenes over the coming weeks.

There is also liberal use of weighted lists, something I’d resisted up until now. I’ve used the same treatment for everything: categories, tags, chronology and projects all use size to convey importance. I’ve not seen them used as extensively as this and I’m not convinced that it will work but we’ll see…

The biggest change round here, for me anyway, is under the hood. I’ve finally diteched the ropey old CMS I’d been using. I wrote it about 5 years ago as a database editor for Access and I haven’t updated it since. Not that useful, really… So I am incredibly happy to welcome Symphony to donotremove. It was a long time coming but it’s been a pleasure to work with. It’s XML/XSL based, which gave me a fairly steep learning curve but now I’m on top of it I love it. XSL is incredibly powerful, even if it is somewhat clunky, and there is no end of documentation available on the web. I’ve tried Wordpress, Textpattern and Expression Engine, and none come close to Symphony. It just thinks the way I think a lightweight CMS should.

And with Symphony has come commenting. This is a new thing for me so we’ll see how that goes…

It’s been a long time coming but willbarras.com has finally gone live! It started out as a proper portfolio site but we’ve ended up with an illustration blog. Will’s work is AMAZING and I’ve not seen this format used for this kind of thing before so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes. Will’s put up 30 images to start with so there’s plenty to look at. My favourites are: Welder, Brolly, Falconry Centre and St Ives.

On a side note, this is my first go with Wordpress. On the plus side, there were plenty of plugins, helpful forums packed with troubleshooting tips and tricks, the Tiger skin for the admin area is gorgeous and I had the basics of the site up and running I no time. On the other hand, I had to hack half the plugins, which were mostly terribly written, I had to delve into the core code to extract some very simple functionality because everything is ‘echo’ed not returned, and the official documentation is sparse. In the end, I probably could have written it from scratch in the time it took me to hack other peoples’ code to do what I wanted.

I don’t know whether I’ll be using it again… For a straight-ahead blog: probably; for something out of the ordinary: no.

I know I’ve been quiet for a while but this is why: Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps. It’s been a couple of weeks in the writing and researching but I’m hoping it’s going to be popular. I don’t really know how to release this one though. For my CSS articles I knew that CSS-D is the place to go. This new one coveres usability, AJAX, javascript and maybe general web development… I guess I’ll just have to leave it and see what happens.

I’ve been very quiet of late and here’s the reason. I’m pleased to announce the launch of Content with Style, finally. It’s been an awful long time coming but we’re finally decided that it’s more important to get the site out there than to sit on it until it’s perfect or we lose interest. So, it’s a bit rough around the edges but we’ll improve and polish it as we go on. It’s our first go with Textpattern too, so some things aren’t quite as we might have liked, probably due to not knowing where to find plugins etc.

Content with Style is intended as a resource for accomplished developers. There won’t be too many beginners articles; we’re aiming more at developers who already know at least a little, if not a lot. For some reason there just don’t seem to be many articles out there for people of that level.

I’ve written two articles for the launch: Modular CSS and A CSS Framework. Both aim to highlight alternative ways of using CSS. I’ve been doing the rounds of web agencies for a couple of years now and all of them could benefit from these techniques. I’m new to writing though, so any feedback is much appreciated.

On a similar note, I’ve started porting DNR over to Symphony and I’m very impressed so far. There are supposed to be big things in the pipeline for the next release candidate. Watch this space.

The .Net magazine article I was in has been published on the interweb and syndicated, apparently. So there’s Ditch the Day Job on the .Net Mag site and Ditch the Day Job on the MaxPC site.

It’s been a ridiculously busy few weeks but I have a couple of site launches to show for it. First up is a small one: Locus Design. I built this one with Draught Associates, who designed it. It’s simple but elegant, XHTML/CSS/Accessible… Um, that’s it I reckon. Thanks to Matt at Draught.

The next one is a touch bigger. Milo Creative asked me to come in and redesign the Ramblers Association site in time for the Freedom to Roam act to go on the law books. The timescale was very tight, giving us about 10 days from initial client meeting to launch, and the budget was limited but I’m very pleased with the result. The home page is live (with a couple of minor problems but should be sorted soon) and the content template is being rolled out across the site at the moment. It’s been very well received internally and I have my fingers crossed for the public at large.

On a technical note… This is my first commercial implementation of Mike Davidson’s sFIR (version 2.0b) and I’m dead impressed. The content will be edited by in-house teams and sFIR has allowed me to hand it off to them safe in the knowledge that the website’s typography will match my design and the off-line material.

Anyway, cheers to Sean at the Ramblers and Argy and Petros at Milo.

Well, this is my first appearance in the press. Gary Marshall interviewed me for his article ‘Freelancing: Ditch the Day Job’ in this month’s .net magazine… and it’s a good article too: well balanced and realistic. It doesn’t make freelancing out to be the easy option and there’s some good advice in there from people in the know. I’m slightly miffed that they didn’t use my photo but then I’m probably to blame for that - the only one I could find was taken at 6am in Thailand waiting for a bus to Cambodia! Hardly the stock, professional-guy-in-shirt-and-tie fodder. Ah well.

Apparently, www.business.gov.uk, which I worked on with Nykris, won best site at the IVCA awards last night. Fantastic! Many congratulations to everyone who worked on it.

The next version is even better… In the meantime though, there’s a good write-up of the award up on the site itself.

I’M BACK!!! I have finally returned from the Far East, after 5 weeks visiting Hong Kong, Yunnan and Beijing. It was good to get back to Hong Kong (I was brought up there) - it still feels like home. I spent loads of money, bought a nice shiny new laptop (17”” monitor, mmmmmm), and took more photos than I can count.

Work seems to have picked up in my absence. I’m now on the books with the Lemon Foundation and we’re doing a little work for Warner Brothers, starting the day I returned from holiday. I have meetings through next week and I’m having to turn down work for the first time in my short freelance career. I guess that means that things are perking up for the industry, which can only be good news. Long may it last!

Woohoo! My Zen Garden submission made it… I’m dead chuffed about that and more than a little bit relieved.

I was trying to do something a little bit different to the other hi-design submissions they’ve had lately… something organic, instead of my usual clinical/minimal layouts. I started out trying to do a hand-drawn design but as I was searching through my scans archive for hand-writing samples I found this 7” packaging I’d saved ages ago. I loved the number of labels the people at the other end had managed to stick on one small piece of cardboard! Looking at it, it occurred to me that it could make quite an interesting basis for a design. And here we are!