There are some very interesting things going on recently in terms of how we put together our sites and it’s leading to quite a few interesting discussions, mostly between those who aren’t ready to even consider using new web technologies until IE offer support for them and those who have whole heartedly embraced the ideas of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. Personally I fall into the latter category, using HTML5 to code up sites and using CSS3 all over the place.

I’ve been using CSS3 in plenty of places (yes even client projects!) and trying to code in HTML5 where possible, but it occurred to me when putting together some stuff with CSS3 animations for my new project StatShare (open up something webkit and have a little look round for it), especially after making a mess of various things and trying out new ideas, it isn’t about getting it right. In the end I did get what I wanted done, and I’m pleased with that, but even if I hadn’t I would have learned plenty more about CSS3 anyway, things that I can take on with me future projects.

As CSS3 isn’t a finished draft either if in my experiments I find that things don’t work as I expect, well then I can write about it, see if other people have similar problems even submit a bug report to the W3 if I want to go that far. Essentially we are the test bed for this new stuff and it’s only by trying new things that we’ll learn how it works and what the limits are.

It’s about learning and testing and helping to move the web forward to better and easier coding methods and techniques, so what if what you try doesn’t work, at least you’ll learn something and you’ll be a few steps ahead of those who aren’t using new coding methods.

Me and @aarmitage had a little discussion about screen resolution in the office the other day and it’s kind of left me thinking – are we ever going to consistently design websites for screens larger then 1024×768 pixels?

Conventional wisdom as we progressed from 800×600 to 1024×768 was that as bigger screens became affordable and PC usage more common place home users would eventually gravitate to a 1920px width screen and so on so forth. However whilst all your designer mates might have large 1920px screens most home PCs are still 1024×768 and as such web designs are generally fitted to a 960px width to sit comfortably on this size screen. Add into the mix the growth of mobile internet and the announcement of the iPad and we’ve come full circle and are right back designing for smaller screens than ever.

So whilst you may design for designers on larger monitors and we will still have to consider where our background goes beyond the 1024px width will we ever find that a commonplace width for client sites or have we reached our widest “normal” width with our 960px wide site?
Will the transition of internet access from the desktop simply mean that we design more fluid sites and mobile alternatives instead, whilst still sticking to conventional widths?

(My RSS reader on a good day)

Recently I’ve been a bit disappointed by a number of articles. They’ve promised me the world and they’ve delivered nothing short of disappointment and badly re-hashed content. But why should I have expected anything? – Because the title of these articles promised so much.
I know blog titles are written to pull in readers, the way we digest the content through twitter and RSS feeds means that titles are written to get people onto the site and add another eyeball to the all important visitor count.

Sure I know titles like “Win that client pitch everytime” are over the top because if they worked everyone would win every pitch and we’d all get no where. However I still expect something from the article, something that says wow or makes me think “oh yeah” at least a little bit as much as the title but sadly so many articles fall short of the bar they set themselves.
An article that disappoints damages a sites credibility and it gives people a negative impression of the writer and first impressions are hard to shake.

But why does it matter? Well great content leads to return visitors, great content gets tweeted around, great content gets bookmarked, great content gets applauded, great content is… well, it’s great.

So bloggers of the web it’s up to you, you can strike a balance, write honest blog titles and your content will either pleasantly surprise people or be just as dull as the honest title you’ve written

…

Or

…

Just write great content! Content that speaks for itself in a much better way than any title you could have given to it.

I implore you all, please try and do the latter and I will try to do so myself.

To be honest I’ve never written an article as a response to some others I’ve read but I’ve heard recently that the homepage is dead! -

http://www.drawar.com/articles/are-homepages-dead-or-are-we-missing-the-boat/69/

http://feedusblog.com/detail.asp?c=614967

Yep your good old index.php or whatever you use isn’t any good any more, it’s been killed by social media, ad-words and deep linking dropping people right into the belly of your website.
So I doubt you’re all going to delete your homepage and leave users with nothing at the top of your website are you? I thought not, which is exactly why the homepage is alive and kicking.

People know how websites work
Which is the primary reason that your homepage won’t die and as such your homepage will always be a point of reference for people – it’s a starting point. If someone wants to go back to square one what do they do? They go to the homepage and they start over. Having been dropped into the middle of your site most people will know that they can just head up to the top of your domain and they will be back to square one.

Repeat visitors
This is another group who are going to use your homepage a lot. When you want to go to an article on say Six Revisions you don’t reel off the full URL from the top of your head do you? Nope – you go to http://www.sixrevisions.com and then go off to find it from there.

This can also be the case with people who arrive at your site from offline advertising, business cards, posters etc. They’re all still going to land on your homepage.

It’s just changed – or has it?
So we all know your homepage isn’t going away and both the writers of the articles above know it isn’t, (ok so if you read the full article they don’t say it’s going away completely either). Your homepage is essentially a contents page, a highlights of the site. Whether that be most recent content, most popular content or just the content you want people to read it is still relevant.
And in essence that’s what it always has been so while people may be landing further into your site they’ll still want to use your homepage and you’ll still need to tailor it in such a way that it helps people get deeper into the site to the content they want to read.

Well I started this post knowing full well there’d be plenty of resolution posts around as we enter this new year, and having not got this finished quickly, there are plenty around. You can’t really make anyone follow a resolution and you should all take up your own but here’s five suggestions from me, if you have room in your life for 12 then head over to Six Revisions and have a read of A Designer’s List of New Year’s Resolutions.

Learn a new language
Lets start with learning a new language. Sure you can go ahead and learn Spanish or French or Japanese and good luck to you, I’ve been trying to learn French for years! But I’m sure you’ve guessed that’s not what I’m on about. I’m saying learn a new web language. If you’re a PHP expert why not learn some JavaScript, if you’re brilliant at both then why not learn a bit of ActionScript. Adding new skills and finding out the capabilities of other technologies will only be beneficial. If you’re not wanting to push yourself too far then why not learn to use a different framework within the languages you already use or even just use a different CMS for a project.

You don’t have to be a coder either, if you’re a designer then why don’t you learn HTML and CSS – it can only help with your design and your knowledge of the medium you’re designing for.

Work with something different
Are you a web designer? then go and design for print. A web programmer? why not try some Java programming or even some design!
Working with a different medium can help to keep your eyes open to different possibilities and avoid the tunnel vision that can come from constantly churning out the same type of project.

Read a book
Turn off the computer – really – it’ll only help you, and whilst you’re away from the computer get your head in a book especially since you’re spoilt for choice at the moment.

• The Smashing Book
• Designing with CSS for a Beautiful Web
• Digging into WordPress
• Sexy Web Design
• Website owners manual

That’s just for starters, there are plenty more great books out there depending on your speciality.

Write some articles
Do some writing, it’ll help you to think about things in more detail. To write confidently about something you need to know it well and look at it in more detail and it’ll really help you to get to grips with the subject.
Personally since writing on here I’ve found that I learn just as much from researching and writing articles as I do from actually coding and trying things out although often the two go hand in hand.
You don’t have to start your own blog, write for other blogs, you’ll get to know other designers as well and connect with more people.

Do something for yourself
You know that project you’ve been meaning to do? That redesign that you’ve been too busy for? Stop putting it off! Look at your diary and pencil it in. Give yourself a free reign away from clients to go and play and get something done for yourself.
I’m currently looking to fit in a revision of this and a few side projects as well. It’ll be a busy year!

So there are my five resolutions, I’m not saying you should do them all, I’m not even saying I will, but if you’ve thought about doing anything new this year then feel free to share it in the comments.

Merry Christmas to everyone, it’s been a busy few days but I thought I’d just put out a little post which will likely be my last before the New Year.
So thanks to everyone for reading the blog this year and here is my take on something which I have a feeling may have been done before somewhere.

10 things to write instead of list posts in the style of a list post

Now I do enjoy a good list post myself (note the word good) but they are quickly becoming the scourge of the blogging community so how about you…..

1. Review a website – give us a tour of the features and design ideas you like/dislike about it instead of a list of sites with some funnily cropped images.
2. Write a tutorial – you may not think you know enough to teach people but remember there are always people starting out who need some help and surely you spend your time in work figuring out new stuff and ideas you can share with people.
3. Create a freebie – give something to people, use your wonderful skills as a graphic designer to create a free wallpaper or you web design skills to create a wordpress template.
4. Go and play with something new – with HTML5 and CSS3 coming into use and JavaScript giving us new things to play with there’s never been a better time to try something new. And let people know how you get on with your experiments.
5. Review something – you could even make yourself some money doing it!
6. Start a discussion – engaging with the people who read your blog is important. Ask them a question and get them thinking, you may learn something new yourself!
7. Take a look at your own blog – if you’ve done something like me you’ll probably be in a constant state of updating your design so take a little time to improve a few bits. What looks ugly? what needs changing? Sort it out!
8. Update your portfolio – very important to make sure you’re showing your best work to prospective clients so it helps to make sure it’s up to date.
9. Leave your computer alone – it’s not healthy being here all the time, so unplug and go have a pint down the pub or something.
10. Sod it and write a list post – you could just give in and write a list post because at the end of the day they do often get read. My personal preference would be to keep it short and snappy and high quality. Most people do not have the time to read 1364 websites with the dogs in.

And with that Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night, be sure to come back in the New Year!

We always seem to leave browser testing till the end, open up Internet Explorer and within about 10 seconds of page load there’s a variety of swear words and we go off to hack our CSS or put in IE only style sheets. God help you if you go crazy and open up IE6, you’re sure to find some form of mess awaiting you.

Recently though my work habits have changed and I’ve decided to stop leaving it until the end, this has been prompted by a few things such as approaching the end of a project having not checked in IE7 and sending a colleague off to show the site to a client who, you guessed it uses IE7. (Sorry Andrew!)

Coupled with that I’ve started to develop sites in Google Chrome. I was impressed with Google Chrome when it first came out and apart from a few too many crashes with flash content it was pretty slick. However the lack of developer tools left me developing in Firefox and using two different browsers seemed a bit impractical.

Recently though I made the decision to switch to Chrome as my primary browser as Firefox has become, well a bit slow and I’ve also started to use more CSS3 which gets more support in webkit based browsers so I’ve been developing and building in Google Chrome.

Now I have of course lost access to all those lovely tools provided by the Firefox web developer toolbar as there doesn’t appear to be an alternative in Chrome yet, although I imagine it won’t be long until one is released.
So as my makeshift solution I’ve worked on the site in Chrome and had it open in Firefox and just pop in when I need to use some of the developer tools. OK having two browsers open all the time isn’t brilliant but it means as I’m working I’m constantly seeing the site in two different browsers and as soon as a problem arises I can sort it out. It also means I’m aware of the browsers all the time and prompt myself to have a quick check in IE every so often.

Generally I’m just keeping on top of cross browser issues, not having to rush in at the end and drag together browser specific style sheets or making changes that may have an effect on other areas of the site.

Whilst some won’t agree and keeping two browsers open isn’t ideal, it is certainly worth keeping tabs on how your development is going in more than one browser rather than one big headache of sorting it all out at the end.

Well I’ve been doing this web design blogging for a month now. Sure I’ve been working in web design and development for years and I’ve blogged before occasionally keeping fifthandlast.com updated but this is my first time blogging about web related topics. So what have a learnt? A few things actually but here’s 5, mostly learnt from buggering something up.

1. Practice what you preach

It’s very easy to get on the high horse whilst you’re writing a blog and evangelising about topics so it helps if you carry out what you’re writing about. For instance don’t tell everyone they should still be making stuff useable in IE6 when your blog has a dud link to an IE6 stylesheet.

2. Check things before you publish them

It doesn’t really matter if it was working this morning make sure it’s working now, before you click publish, just check. Again I learnt this by messing something up and publishing the CSS Hover tabs tutorial but before I put it online I changed a few things on the demo and forget to check it over in IE.

3. Don’t click publish straight away

This is one thing that’s quite often easy to do, finish your article give it a quick read over and then click publish. Personally I’ve found it’s better to write something and leave it, at least a few hours, then re-read it. You’ll no doubt have a different view and maybe change a few things, notice some stuff that doesn’t read so well.

I think this is true of most work, not just blogging, I now always make sure especially when designing, that I leave something overnight or at least a few hours before sending it to a client for example.

4. Take the time to prepare

Good preparation can lead to much better articles. I’ve started to carry around a little notebook and jot down ideas and keep brainstorming around them, all the time keeping an eye out for examples that will help reinforce my articles. Taking time and putting in preparation leads to a much more satisfying and higher quality article.

5. Enjoy it

I have, thankfully! It’s been great fun writing and getting comments and seeing retweets of my content, hugely satisfying. I’m sure there’ll come a point where I get a bit fed up of it, but for now it’s enjoyable. I’ll bring you a nice article about getting over a slump if I ever get there!

But for now thanks to all those who have visited the blog, left comments, tweeted content or linked to here. I hope to continue writing on here and growing the readership and I’m sure I’ll have another 5 things to tell you next month.

When I started writing on this blog I thought to myself “don’t churn out loads of IE6 posts”, well, I let myself get a little indulgent and wrote one and since then one thought has occurred to me reading people’s anti IE6 comments and all the bring down IE6 websites. A lot of them have quite simply missed the point of the whole thing.

I’m sure we can all agree that IE6 is not a good browser, that it should be gotten rid of and that until Microsoft unplug support it will still be around, but you shouldn’t stop supporting it because YOU don’t like it. According to browser statistics from October Firefox has surpassed IE6 in terms of users but a quick scroll down shows a whopping 23.30% of the market share still sits with IE6! That’s nearly a quarter of internet users still using IE6, sad and annoying – yes, but can you really turn away that many users simply for using a rubbish browser?

So you should really be asking who are you designing for? Are you designing for you and all your colleagues using Safari on the Mac or are you designing for the rest of the world? To reach as many people as possible?

Another comment that brought this home was posted by Paul Boag and labelled “Possibly the dumbest statement I have ever read” and goes a little something like this:

According to Whistles’ Jane Sheperdson, ‘We spent a lot of time researching best practice online. We then threw out everything we had learned, and just designed something that pleased us visually.’

The title is possibly a little harsh but it again begs the question, who are you designing for? If you’re designing an eCommerce site then you should most certainly be designing for the customer!

The Whistles.co.uk site thankfully isn’t that bad, they have a rather unusual, slightly confusing homepage but once you get into the site it appears normal service is resumed, but can you really afford to just say sod you lot out their I’m designing for me?

As I’ve said before simply making everything accesible for people using IE6 will do (see Andy Clarke’s post http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/universal_internet_explorer_6_css) but you really should remember that the internet isn’t all about you, it’s about the visitors to your site, the people who make everything tick.