Growing up is optional

I’ve upgraded to WP1.5 and am using the theme ‘Placid‘ from Chris Lin. I’m still working out a few things, like getting caching on my del.icio.us links in the sidebar working.

At the moment I’m working on lots of boring stuff and not doing any interesting web development. So here goes my limited time free offer: If you have a design/page/template that is currently bad tag soup, or just a photoshop or fireworks design and you would like it turned into a standards compliant page/template, just let me know and I’ll help you out.

To Clarify: I’m not a graphic designer. If you have something that is already designed, but the background code is a mess or non-existant and want it fixed I’ll give it a go.

It’s been said that good Information Architecture goes un-noticed (by Rosenfeld and Morville I think), which is something I agree with. So this got me thinking how to explain to my bosses why we should spend money on something that nobody sees. Of course the converse is that poor IA is noticed.

To explain it I went through the following thought exercise:

Imagine that you’ve walked into a large public building like a theatre or something similar that you have never been in before and you are busting to use the toilet. One of two things could happen:

• You quickly glance at where you think the toilet shoud be, see a sign and make you way their (relieved).
• You look around, can’t see the toilet, walk around the foyer looking, still can’t see it so you try to find the ticket desk to ask them. When you do find it they explain that if you go up the stairs, turn left, go to the end of the corridor and the men’s is the third door (or is it the fourth?).

In the first case it’s where it should be: where you look (intuitive is the term often bandied about). In the second, the building was designed poorly and while helpful, the ticket staff had to give you a very complex set of instructions.

And so it is with IA. If it’s good, your stakeholders are happy. If it’s poor, your stakholders mess your floor.

I’m playing with Wordpress 1.5 so things may look a little weird here. I really like the theme setup and also the ability to write pages instead of posts. There may be a few bugs over the next day or two. Hopefully not too serious. Update: let me know it there are any problems

I received an email today announcing the new Chemical Brothers’ website. I’m a big fan and want to point out while their website is terrible, it doesn’t make me like their music any less.

In conjunction with the release of their new album ‘Push The Button’ Tom & Ed launch their new web site:

It’s choc full of new areas, so as well as news, tour dates and the message board you can now download wallpaper and buddy icons, there is a mobile area for all your ringtunes, you can check out all your favourite tunes and videos and there will also be a fully fledged shop for all your Chems needs. The new site will be up from midday GMT on the 7th January so have a look round and let us know your thoughts via the feedback section

However, the site is an accessibility nightmare. I don’t know of any accessibility rules it doesn’t break. You can’t even get into the site without allowing pop-ups (and obviously Javascript to generate the pop-ups), so there goes half of their audience already. It then proceeds to resize your browser to around 800×600 minus scrollbars and toolbars, which it removes anyway. Oh yes, it’s all done in Flash too. Navigation is a nightmare. One positive is that they do label the link to their discography, which is a PDF, as a PDF so that you know what you are getting in to.

I for one will not be visiting their site again, but I’m looking forward to seeing them at the Big Day Out.

Turns out I was right

Blog comment spam increases

I know its’s obvious, not insightful. Rampant advertising and page rank stealing will continue.
I’m surprised that blog spammers are still submitting forms. I don’t
know why they haven’t started using trackback/pingback yet.

I’m being comment-spammed by trackback in a major way

After yesterday’s yak about design, I thought it would be good to post some sites from which I get inspiration, or sites where there are different design elements that I really like. That way, once my rebuild is complete, you can see for yourself whether or not I have coppied the inspiration, or the outcome.

I will add to this list as I find other inspiration

• Manly Pink #1 (PhotoMatt)
• The Beauty and Business of CSS (Doug Bowman)
• A List Apart (HappyCog)
• mezzoblue (Dave Shea)
• CSS Zen Garden (Home Page, C Note by Brian Williams)
• Eris Free (particularly My Favorite Scarf)

UPDATE: The list is far from complete: I ran out of time before posting. I know most of these are ‘A-listers’ in the blog and/or web design world but I don’t want to be just another ‘me too’ copycat. These are in no particular order.

• Adam Poselli
• Andy Budd
• D. Keith Robinson
• Richard Rutter
• Andrei Herasimchuk
• The Man in Blue
• Zooiblog
• Veerle
• Jeff Croft

You know how we are told not to use “click here” for link text and PDFs are Unfit for Human Consumption? Check out the #1 google search results for “click here”