18August2008
Posted by Dan under: web development.
I know that when I was working it out for myself I had no technical background and no understanding of programming. After getting so far with it, I went to university to fill in the blanks. The most relevant local course was Multimedia Systems, which had some background/theory and some web-related modules.
My experience of this was that the few web related modules were pretty poor, even from what I knew back then. Here’s HTML; you can only use a few fonts on the web; you can add CSS, javascript and Flash to web-pages: End. I’ve often thought about offering up night classes or getting more into the education side; not because I consider myself an expert but because I generally don’t feel that there’s much encouragement or support for people wanting to end up in the web industry.
It’s great to find out by trial and error and figure it out for yourself; in many ways that’s a great way to learn. I’m thinking that as someone very new to the field comes in, there’s so much they’re not aware of which isn’t directly related to technology:
- Accessibility - how do people use websites? how can differently-abled people use websites? What prohibits easy use?
- Colours - ever done and colour theory, know which colours work together? Ever considered colour-blindness?
- Typography - there are a relatively small number of web-safe fonts, but which work best on the web? What about spacing and using typography as part of design?
- Copy-writing - what’s the best way of writing for the web? How does it differ from other media channels?
- Security - aside from technical issues; do you want to share everything publicly on your site? Do you know how your site could be vulnerable?
I feel that most if not all of these kind of issues transcend whether you’re wanting to go down the design or development route (or both) and maybe there’s room for some kind of semi-formal teaching about this stuff for those that are interested from school to university levels.
Start with your eyes wide open.
Any thoughts?
16August2008
Posted by Dan under: web development.
I’ve recently had a week away in North Devon, staying at a farm house out in the countryside; something which I love to contrast working with computers all the time. I wasn’t entirely tech-free as I had access to someone’s laptop with their 3G node connection.
From time to time I’d check Gmail and Twitter and occasionally browse for a few minutes but because of where we were, there was no 3G coverage, so it was relying on GPRS. It wasn’t awful but it was a comparable connection to the old 56kbps modems used before the days of broadband.
This reminds me a lot about thinking about the audience for a new site or web app. When using Gmail, there is a link to a basic HTML version but it was still trying to load up the AJAX heavy version in the meantime, which meant it took a fair while before it’d let me in. It’s easy to make assumptions that most people have broadband and that most people have a certain spec machine but it this too exclusive or fair in the name of pushing things forwards?
I often have the debate about fixed or fluid layouts, which I feel is very much about catering for a wider audience because of that that the assumption about screen-size can be dropped and the design needs to acquire additional skills to have the grid work under different constraints, which isn’t easy.
Alongside of connection speed and screen size, I also used my LG Viewty for accessing the web from time to time. Devices will continually play a part in defining audience. The iPhone has reinvigorated the debate about there being ‘one web’ or catering for different experiences. Another factor is price. The iPhone (again) has disrupted this pattern. For a flat fee you can have unlimited web usage on a device that is made for browsing the web, using an established browser engine (Safari powered by WebKit). The Viewty isn’t bad but I have a small allowance or web downloads and will cost £7.50 per month more to have unlimited access. The issue is that the device isn’t as targeted for web browsing as the iPhone and so I feel like this expense isn’t worth it.
When thinking about who uses our sites/apps, we need to understand the various kinds of people that will use a site. I recently had my PC cock-up, which avoiding a tedious tech anecdote, prevented my mouse from working continuously, so I had to use my machine through keyboard alone. Using the keyboard as the primary input device may not be as common as the mouse but people do it and some with disabilities may reply on this mechanism (I’m thinking about physical impairments). When considering accessibility, it’s easy to assume obvious cases such as blindness but there are many conditions or circumstances that can inhibit the usability and accessibility of a site from colour-blindness (try this tool) or deafness (see this article at A List Apart) to poor sight or physical disabilities.
In short, being myself in positions that have given me a different experience of using the web has again reminded me that the potential audience for a site could be anybody. A niche site will attract a different demographic but within this demographic will still be people with poor web connections or using non-desktop devices or have some kind of impairment or disability. We have the tools and the information at hand to make more positive experiences fr the widest number of people within our audience.
31July2008
Posted by Dan under: General.
It can be too easy to be a web developer in isolation, whether your working in an agency getting your head down or as a freelancer working from home, so I’m making moves to get more immersed in the web community. Aside from using more social tools like Twitter, I’m getting out to dConstruct (my first conference in years) followed by BarCampBrighton3 (my first BarCamp!). Hoping to got a few others too (Geek in the Park, SocialMediaCamp as well as finally making it GeekUp meet-ups). I’ve even been asked to be on a panel with Elliot Jay Stocks at the Web Developer’s Conference down in Bristol this year in November (cheers Alex).
So far, so good! Give me a shout if you’re going to any of these events or have any others that are worth checking out.
31July2008
Posted by Dan under: social web.
I have to admit, I’m not an early adopter of Twitter. The idea of effectively sharing short ‘Facebook status’-like updates or SMS messages with a group of people just didn’t seem to make sense. I have to admit I’m hooked now and here’s why:
- Certainly within the web developer community, pretty much anyone who has a blog is on there
- These snippets (’tweets’) can be insightful into how other people are working, such as I’ve found with Snook recently
- It’s good for contacts - not that this will be life-changing in itself but it can be a more personal medium
- You can get news often before it’s blogged/published - bloggers often comment about what they’re up to before the content is up as was the can with Ryan Carson (Carsonified) before the launch of the Future of Mobile conference site. Good for early feedback.
- When working in isolation (at home of whatever) I find it reminds me that there other people out there.
More than this, I can see how it can be useful for businesses too.
The obvious thing for a business/retailer is to see it as purely another platform to push content out to. To some extent that can be true in the case of The Guardian or BBC News, where breaking stories are tweeted out to their community. It’s a great additional channel for news media but could be used differently for say an e-commerce retailer.
The key for this market is that you can really engage with your audience: your customers. It’s a brave move for some companies but to embrace social media in this way can give you a one-on-one with your public and talk about their concerns about your service and also the positive things they may have to say. It also gives you a chance to respond to current events more flexibly. Maybe there’s a news item about your company; maybe you could address that situation in a very non-corporate kind of way and therefore appear more trustworthy. Admit your flaws and discuss them openly!
When talking in a community like this, don’t keep pushing your products; you’ll alienate your followers. Talk to them and find out what you can do better. Learn more about who your customers are and occasionally reward them - give them exclusive deals as a thank you.
Anyone else have experiences of using Twitter (or similar; Plurk, Identi.ca)? Any suggestions about how businesses should use micro-blogging?
10July2008
Posted by Dan under: General.
Nice one Opera; there’s a lot of really useful stuff in here for web developers starting out. If you’re starting out be like a sponge and be sure you’re aware of this stuff. This is what you need to know at the basic level to be a web developer in 2008.
10July2008
Posted by Dan under: General.
I’m finally making more of an attempt to get involved in the web development community so I’m making dConstruct my first conference (organised by clear:left). The theme this year is about the social web, which is right up my street. In fact I was really pleased to see that they have Josh Porter (Bokardo.com) speaking, so I know it’s going to be good. You should check out his book ‘Designing for the Social Web‘ if you haven’t already.
If you’re going, drop me a line and maybe grab a pint while we’re down there!
10July2008
Posted by Dan under: General.
If you’ve been here before, you’ll have noticed I’ve finally given the site a make-over, courtesy of EdMerrit (a designer at Headscape). He has a few ‘pixel-based products’ available from his site Ten by Twenty; this is his WP theme Autumn Concept. Just need to get round to plugging in some of my own photography and make myself at home ;)
22May2008
Posted by Dan under: social web.
First up, I stumbled upon this post by Jacob Madison ‘Social Network Sites Are The Emperor’s New Clothes‘, which has a great handle on the current situation with Data Portability and social networks. It’s great to read a similar point of view to my own that a social networks’ real value isn’t in the amount of users’ data it has in it’s silo but how much attention (visits, time on site, APML) it or it’s services are getting from the people that use their services.
It looks like Facebook is enforcing it’s ownership of your communication now; see ‘Facebook Censoring User Messaging: Spam Prevention or Unaccountable Control of Conversation?‘. If this is the case, what are they afraid of? Is it that people discussing niche networks are attempting to get their friends to use another service, so they’re censoring personal messages. This is a sad day for what I used to think was a decent service.
It’s great to see people talking about some of the wider issues of using the web as a more social medium. We all know that since the web started it has been a communications platform (BBS, etc) but now we’re almost socialising everything and the implications of what it actually means to be ’social’ in terms of our personal information, communication, interests and our network(s) of contacts are becoming clear it’s an interesting time to see how we can tackle the issues we find.
15May2008
Posted by Dan under: social web.
So, in the last week we’ve seen MySpace, Facebook, Google and no doubt other lost in the news rush all promoting their data portability initiatives or attempts at lowering the bar for people to use data sharing or access a person’s social network across platforms. This is all great news in terms of taking very real steps towards changing the web.
While in the short term we have market segregation in terms of the fact that we’re bound to have organisations trying out their own ideas of how they want to share or be open or use other services I think that we need to understand that all of these things are just baby steps. Who know which technology or combination thereof will end up being the de facto for data portability? It’s not just portability either (ie. seemlessly moving your data from one place to another) but identity (enabling a single sign-on for many services) and access to your stuff buried deep in site’s silos (your images, etc in MySpace, Flickr, et al).
There’s a lot of interlinked concepts here, which is in part the reason it’s going to take a while before we have any established methods or standards. We need to watch what these companies are doing and encourage them on, experiment with our own developments and share our opinions about what we want out of this as web users and developers.
Once we have gone a long way down this road, I can imagine that the web could be a very different place. You will have control over your stuff. You only every need to remember one user-name (or URL) and password (in a perfect world) and you should be able to talk to friends across social networks and share media from one service to the next. As well as imparting this power to the people, most sites should be able to take advantage of this social layer, which could change what they offer. In terms of social networks, you should be able to choose the one you like best and share across networks. This means that to retain members networks should be concise and offer clear USPs and not try and copy each other so much. Niche networks could actually benefit the most, as they could be the ‘home’ network for many people and not have a restriction on only being able to share within that (potentially) small user-base.
It’s all interesting steps…
12May2008
Posted by Dan under: social web.
Through my ton of feeds I found these today, which are pretty interesting…
First of all, Chris Messina has a great lengthy post about data portability, which explains a bit about it, the good, the bad, the benefits. Definitely worth a read!
It’s also worth checking out this post about how OpenID and APML could be used in shopping online and another from Carsten ‘Data Portability? Let’s get rid of it‘. On the whol, he has a valid point. There’s so many people and groups trying to find a means of sharing personal information and our networks. There’s loads of interrelated technologies involved in this openness of data and many big companies all involved in the processes behind establishing a way forward.
It’s great to have some big names on board, to help finalise a easy way to implement a way of providing an open service but at the same time they’re trying out their own initiatives. The idea of people open is fraught with problems and issues around privacy and security but for the (developer section of the) public, having so many examples of data portability emerging throughout the web just makes for uncertainty - if you’re creating an app or extending one you already have and want to embrace the idea of openness what do you do? Do you wait for one of these working groups to produce something you can latch on to? Select one of the big initiatives (OpenSocial, Data Availability, etc) or maybe figure it out for yourself?
This makes the ideas of being open and sharing data still seem a long way off in practical terms. I’m sure though that if enough people discuss the issues and prove technologies and implementations it can’t be long before developing around these ideas can be a more fundamental part of how we make sites and applications on the web.
