web development and design
I’m a big fan of Web Directions, the conference series that was born out of two Web Essentials conferences in ‘04 and ‘05 and grew up into a South version (in Sydney) and a North version (in Vancouver) that between them lay claim to be the most important gabfests to focus on standards-based web design. …
Another superb two day conference laid on by John and Maxine (representative of the many involved, of course) finished yesterday. The new venue at Darling Harbour was great and the program was, as always, remarkable. My highlights included: Andy Clarke – Think Like a Mountain: I grew up with pocket sized B&W WWII comics, The …
Yesterday was unusual.I was picked up by taxi from my Corrimal home at 6.30am for an hour-and-fifteen drive to Sydney Airport, where I boarded a four hour flight to Perth. I was picked up at Perth Airport and driven to a two hour meeting with Bam Creative about working together on a new web project. …
Pens down! For the past 24 hours, I’ve been following the progress of FullCodePress, the local section of an international competition to build a website in a day under controlled conditions. Australian and New Zealand teams of designers, coders, programmers, content managers and usability professionals have been locked up since 9.30am yesterday until just a …
It shouldn’t surprise that a book about beautiful design is beautifully designed. Still, Jason Beaird and the Sitepoint editors do such a great job of applying The Principles of Beautiful Web Design to the book itself, it’s worth remarking on. Like the best web sites it describes, this book has rich content, is well-structured and …
I haven’t completely pondered all the implications of this, but I’m sure it means something. I’ve previously sung the praises of my favourite online store REMO, purevyors of many nifty and beautiful things. In a recent newsletter, REMO advised that they were offering a new t shirt featuring the Dvorak keyboard. They even provided an …
I’ve been following an interesting path in the last few weeks. As well as starting on a couple of new website commissions and fulfilling my regular client content management obligations, I’ve been working on what amounts to a spate of newsletters recently. There are aspects to this kind of work that generate some heat. There …
I had the pleasure of attending Search Summit 2007 this week, which bills itself as “THE Australian Search Marketing Conference”. That would be a big call for any conference, let alone one that focuses on what is now called ‘the search industry’, but it lived up to the billing. The speaker who was probably most …
I’ve recently dipped my virtual toes into the waters surrounding web standards and accessibility. This has involved absorbing current and past opinions offered by members of the Web Standards Project and participating in the mail list maintained by the Web Standards Group. WSP provides lot of food for thought about the big picture – why …
When I started working in IT, I acquired a reputation for having an ‘affinity’ with computers. This was, of course, complete nonsense. All I did, that no-one else seemed to do, was read the manual. That’s not always a small feat, given that many computer-related manuals seem to have been written by people for whom …