I have re-thought, re-worked and re-designed this website a total of 5 times since its conception, roughly once per year. Each time in an attempt to create a better web site for my company.

The bane of most web designer is true of me also, I’m never happy and am by far my most demanding, awkward client, often I’m starting another before I’ve even finished the last.

When I took the current version of this website live a couple of weeks ago I got an email from one of my clients wondering where my last version had gone, she preferred that one over the current, that’s the problem with designing for yourself, its the wrong approach, its not me I am trying to please, its mix of both new customers and existing web design peers. I liked the last version, it had impact, I redesigned because although the homepage was good, the design did not work on any of the more content heavy pages, everything was just too big.

When designing for clients you end up designing for two people, you and the client, whilst this isn’t the best way, its better than doing it or one.

What you really need to do is find out what the sites customers want, they are the people you are trying to impress, in fact they are the whole reason you are creating a website at all.

But how? you ask, try one of the following ~

1. Pretend that you are a customer.  This is the cheapest (its free) and can be useful, sit down and think about your customer, be detailed, who is he/she? once you have an idea of who they are, work out why they would want to come to your website, then, how are they going to get there and finally what are the going to want to do when they are there. Its likely that you will have more than one customer type who will have different reasons for coming to you and want different things, that’s fine, work your way through them all individually. Doing all this will help you identify the important things on your website, you can then make sire that these are easily accessible.
2. Ask your current customers. This is pretty easy to do and in some cases can work. Put a feedback form or survey on your website, you may have to give people an incentive to fill it in and be prepared that most won’t. If you do manage to get data back though it can be invaluable in finding out what your customers want.
3. Ask strangers. This can be expensive but if done well will be far more useful than the previous two. Get strangers to sit down in front of your website and ask them to do something, recording their actions etc. can be very useful in discovering areas of your website which are not very good.

Even if you don’t like what people say about your website it is always worth listening, and the beauty of a website over other forms of advertising or media is that it can be changed and improved pretty easily.

Peace out.

Automattic inc. The whizz kids whom invented Wordpress, Keep an up to date list of vetted Wordpress consultants, whose services they recommend to anyone contacting them for commercial Wordpress related projects. Edge Designs is now included on that list as a recommended Wordpress consultancy firm.

We are only the 2nd Uk based company to be included, and are feeling pretty pleased with ourselves right now.

Evolution not Revolution As we already have business cards etc. which use the logo and colour scheme from the last redesign I couldn’t change things too drastically

When I decided to take the plunge and work for myself as a web professional full time in March of this year one of the first things I did was design my brand. Even though prior to this I had a website (that in itself went through 3 definite redesigns, I had been freelancing alongside my day job for around 4 years after all) the design had never been anything more than whatever I was interested in at the time.

When web design became my day job I relished the notion that I would have more time to spend working on both the design and content of my business site and I began designing.

Unfortunately I had made one significant mistake in all of this, my assumption that working as a web designer full time would give me more time was way off the mark. What actually happened, as I am sure those of you whom have done simlilar things will already know, is that now that I was relying solely on my work as a web designer for my income I spent all my time doing client work trying to make enough money to eat and when finally I had finished all of that the last thing I wanted to do was design for myself.

This had a pretty damaging effect on the last version of my website, it meant that what was supposed to be a well thought out carefully implemented design process turned into a rather large mess, things would lurch forward between client work and stagnate again until the next break in the clouds. What was even worse was that once I had started there was know going back, I needed a website. Without one my chances of impressing new clients would be severely damaged especially since, as a new company all my work was for local small business, my website needed to be impressive enough to allow me to bid for larger projects with confidence. The fact that I needed things online yesterday meant that I had little time to test things properly meaning my original thinking and ideas were not fully realized. All in all the previous design ended up being too large and too messy (the grid was none existent and the vertical rhythm forgotten).

What your seeing now is my answer to these problems, its not finished, but its finished enough to be online, it can evolve over time. With the 5^th iteration I have worked with what I had before, I’ve cleaned it up and have hopefully produced something more elegant, more mature and I hope you like it.

I am planning to document the different aspects of the design in future posts, I have done some new things with Wordpress that I have never done before and I am keen to write about those, I also want to write more about my experiences in setting up as a lone web developer / designer.

Reading through a back copy of Readers Digest the other day I came across an article on the body paintings of artist Guido Daniele, his hand animals really sparked my imagination and like the good host I am I decided to share them with all of you guys.

Elephant ~ European advertising campaign Schroeders ~ 2002

Found via: guidodaniele.com

I found this via a comment on Oxtons site and I think its amazing, infact I am blogging this from a javascript Safari as we speak, superb.

Check out the OSX Desktop recreated in dom script/Javascript and marvel.

Via The Man in Blue

I thought of the name by the way and I am rather proud of it, so much so that I can’t imagine why no one else thought of it first, well I suppose someone did as joeblogs.com, joebloggs.com, joeblogs.co.uk and joebloggs.co.uk are all taken, although none of them contain anything remotely like a person called Joe who blogs.

Anyway check it out, subscribe to his RSS feed, make it your homepage; its your choice

I was doing well, I had wp-gatekeeper installed and thus far hadn’t had any comment spam at all, in fact only one dubious comment since I started; I was happy.

Then I read the post on Bad Behaviour and I thought, wow that would be nice, no spam and less interference with my visitors trying to comment. So I installed it and disabled Wp-gatekeeper. I got spammed, not many, but enough, grr.
I am going to leave it running as it is for another couple of days however and if I continue to get spammed then I will change back to wp-gatekeeper again. Its a kind of experiment, yippee.

Not.

When plugins are so easy to implement as with wordpress, people can get a bit carried away and you end up with sites full of features that don’t really benefit its users, while this might be ok for a personal site that is used as a bit of a web playground; it can have a negative effect on sites that are should be more user focused.

Another more technical problem that arises from the use of plugins is that not all plugins produce code that validates or that follows good web standards practises, this can be very frustrating for web developers who know what they are doing as it means that their sites won’t validate if they don’t go through and sort out the plugins code. It creates a different problem for web masters who have little knowledge or interest in web standards as they can create feature rich site with ease without realising the problems.

Some of the plugins that I would like to see cleaned up are the Intouch plugin which at the moment inserts all the JavaScript and css in-line instead of separating it into a separate file. Also the Livesearch plugin which is very popular at the moment due to its ajaxyness creates non standard attributes to achieve something that can be done easily via JavaScript (a post on how to make the livesearch plugin validate has already been written).

I don’t mean to have a go at plugin developers or anything I mean I use both of the mentioned plugins on my site and they provide features that I am not capable of coding myself at the present time. I am just a bit of a stickler for clean code.

The fact that this is a sort of reply means that you should probably read the original post first, if the thought of doing so makes you cringe then don’t do it; it’s that simple.

The main point of his article is summed up here anyway, so don’t fret to much. Roger says that if Internet Explorer improves their standards support people will stop using Firefox and slink back to IE7, thus the Firefox invasion will cease and IE will be lord of the browser market once more, bringing with it all the problems that this does. I won’t go into these here as they are covered in Rogers article and the ongoing comments . I think that Roger has missed out some important points here and that when we take these extra points into consideration the argument becomes flawed.

Firstly the simple (or rather complicated) act of IE improving its standards support (and doing so as an act of priority) will bring standards into the main stream even more and can surely only help to widen the adoption of standards on the internet as a whole; this is a good thing. Firefox has still not broken into the mainstream and your average joebloggs dad is still blissfully unaware of anything browsery and thinks that the internet and the blue e are one and the same. Thus if IE starts talking standards they will have a far bigger and more respected audience among non geeky web users

If this means that people download and start using IE7 then so they should, Firefox should have more than just standards support (which isn’t perfect in itself anyway) to set it apart as an viable and interesting choice to users. Firefox is more than just IE with standards support it just needs to focus on its other qualities more. I think its an insult to Firefox and Mozilla to suggest that their browser can only stand up because IE is so crap.

While at the moment it might be true that using IE6 on windows is a dangerous thing and akin to putting up a sign directing spy ware to your computer, this will surely change as the main focus of IE7 is security and I am sure that Microsoft don’t want there Operating systems loaded with crap any more than you or I do.

Competition creates innovation and while what Microsoft are doing may not be innovative it should and hopefully will force Firefox to innovate even more and release an even better browser. Thus Microsoft releasing a better browser will hopefully be a good thing and help to squeeze just that little bit more out of alternative browser makers.

From Firefox’s point of view the release of IE7 is a bit premature however and it perhaps would have been better if they could have just acquired a few more points of market share from Microsoft to ensure a proper slice of the action.

What do you lot think eh?

The only things I lost were 2 posts and a catagory, not to bad I don’t think. Unfortunately I won’t get much chance to play with my new host as I am off to Majorca (Mallorca?) for the week for some sun and drink. So unless I find a cafe you won’t hear from me untill I get back.

Bye Bye (any of you lot going on holiday, if so where?)