web designer: ricky onsman

Lingo is the new web presence I have designed for the Languages Action Alliance, a loose coalition of parents, academics, teachers and community members who want to see improvement in the way Australia provides languages education, especially for young children.

It’s been an interesting project for several reasons. One of the main ones for me is that the protagonists know enough about the web to know that way too many websites end up stuffed with info that no-one ever sees.

I figured what was needed here was some way to collect, store and make available a whole range of information ‘bites’ relating to languages education, from personal anecdotes and observations, consumer recommendations of products and services, wish lists, comparisons, theories and expert opinions, all the way to doctoral theses and commercially published books.

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Gosh, it never rains but it pours.

My fourth new site in a week (!) went live today. Honestly, folks, it’s not normally like this.

It’s a redesign of an existing site for Bethany College Hurstville, a Catholic secondary girls school in Sydney’s southern suburbs.

I like this kind of brief because it involves working with an existing body of content of some substance.

Arranging that content so as to best meet the needs of site visitors is a part of the process I really enjoy.

It requires me to come to grips with the totality of the information to be presented, the aims of the client, the needs of the site visitor and resources available to me to be able to mesh them all into a web presence that is so functional that visitors don’t even notice how well structured it is.

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There’s another top notch web conference coming up in these parts.

Edge of the Web will be held in Perth from 6-7 November, hosted by the relatively recently formed industry body the Australian Web Industry Association.

Like Web Directions, Edge of the Web has a terrific speaker lineup with international guests Chris Messina (with whom I was impressed in Vancouver) and Derek Featherstone (again) as well as local The Man in Blue, toolmantim, Lisa Herrod, Russ Weakley, Donna Spencer (nee Maurer), Ben Buchanan, Laurel Papworth and more.

Good folk all, and bloody good at what they do.

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Not long now until it’s time for Web Directions South again. It’ll be great to catch up again with old friends and make some new ones, but it’s the content of the WD sessions that makes this event indispensable for me and, as usual, this year’s line-up looks great.

As a solo freelancer working from home an hour and a half’s drive south of Sydney, Web Directions represents a significant and rare opportunity to extend my professional development, broadening my knowledge of what’s happening - and about to happen - in web design and development.

While I follow a lot of what’s creating discussion on the web itself, there is something very personalising about having someone tell it to you face to face, albeit alongside a few hundred other enthusiasts in a lecture theatre.

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All my life, I’ve been into quizzes and puzzles of all sorts. I don’t know exactly where it came from, but I remember tackling crosswords from a very early age, and my favourite reading in my pre-teens was the dictionary.

One of my favourite quotes ever is from Alex Trebek, the long time host of the TV quiz show Jeopardy, who said, “I’m curious about everything, even subjects that don’t interest me“.

So it should come as no surprise that following the launch of sites for a precision cutting tool distributor, a family-school partnerships bureau, a book publisher, an automotive muffler and exhaust shop and a photographer, my newest website is for a concert pianist.

Marilyn Meier-Kapavale has an unbelievably distinguished career, starting as a child prodigy from Sydney’s south west, studying in the US and Europe, concerts around the world and then teaching the next generation of Australian musicians - currently in Queensland.

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My stint developing the web presence of Advanced Manufacturing Australia (then called Tooling Australia) exposed me to a range of new potential clients.

That has led to a few new commissions, including one that goes live today for Teco Pty Ltd.

Teco is a Victorian company that imports top end precision cutting tools and related advanced manufacturing equipment from international suppliers and distributes them to customers in Australia and New Zealand.

Like all the projects that come my way, this one had some very specific circumstances and conditions to take into account.

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