Posts by Simon

Microformats – Google back the RDFa format

By Simon, 5 August, 2009, No Comment

One of the big issues of Web 2.0 is the computers inability to distinguish what the content is. You might well have “Author: Simon Day” which, to a human, is very obvious but to a search engine spider or computer it isn’t because the page can contain many names. It simply cannot extrapolate the information as well as a human because the pages can contain many other names, dates, times, URL’s, email addresses and so on . What we’ve needed for a long time is a way for the spiders and computers to know what is actually happening on a section of a page and give it precise details like, as an example, the when, the what and the who.

Microformats are a way of adding a small piece of markup so it can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

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All the IE bugs plus fixes in one handy location

By Simon, 29 May, 2009, 1 Comment

There are a number of IE bugs and with IE8 the bug list just keeps on growing. Positioneverything.net has the nost extensive list of IE bugs and fixes I’ve seen.

Visit: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

Every web designer should have this bookmarked!

Web design questions to ask new clients

By Simon, 22 May, 2009, 26 Comments

One of the hardest things for a designer is the actual build of the web site. Do you often sit there staring at a blank page wondering how you’re going to start? This is common among a lot of designers and the solution is in the questions you ask the client at the initial meeting. Get this wrong or don’t bother doing it and the whole process becomes a lot harder.

Get as many of the following questions answered and 85% of the design battle is already done because you will already know what needs to go on the page and where to place it.

Just giving you the questions isn’t enough because you need to understand why the questions are asked. For this reason I have also included example options for the more in-depth questions so you can see why the question is important and what kind of answer you’re looking for. Get all this right and the page will pretty much build itself!

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Latest site goes online

By Simon, 14 May, 2009, No Comment

chrisclarke-photography

Chris Clarke Photography

A lot of thought and usability testing went into this design. My knowledge of eye-tracking played a large part in not only the build but also the way the site interacts with the client by way of a mouse over colour on an otherwise black & white photo. This subtle contrast really makes the homepage stand out.

People searching for photographers have a clear goal in their minds. I wanted nothing to distract the user from finding the page they were seeking in the clearest and simplest way possible. All the usual clutter you see on photographers websites have been avoided and the patterns were carefully chosen for their camera-like materials.

I have made extensive use of CSS3 on all pages to make the site more future proof and the same styles are applied throughout the site to maintain continuity.

The client is updating the gallery pages himself and look out for his blog coming soon.

Visit Chris Clarkes website.

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