Okay, I’m a little biased here as mediaburst are one of my clients – and I designed the web interface for Florence too – but I really think it’s a great product and I’m glad the industry is giving it the recognition it deserves.

Florence allows patients and clinicians to stay in contact through the patient’s mobile phone. If you’re interested, you can read more about telehealth app Florence here.

View all 2011′s Big Chip nominations.

Some people may think the new typography is a little cheesy and overused (especially so in the amateur market) but I feel it really adds a new layer of vibrancy to this site’s design.

What do you think?

I know a lot of web developers/designers wrote off the iPad as soon as it was announced stating reasons like, ‘it’s just a big iPhone/iPod touch‘ or ‘why do I need this when I have a laptop?‘

The positives

For me, a big iPod touch is precisely what I needed. I wanted a device that I could sit on the couch with and book my holiday and not have to squint to view the screen. I needed a device to let me watch videos on the train/plane with once again not having to strain to see the picture and without it taking up too much room in my bag.

When I’m at home I don’t like getting out the 13″ MacBook to do any quick web surfing; it’s too bulky, has to load up and generally just gets in the way – with the iPad it’s so much lighter and faster to get things done. The iPad is also so much better for writing emails than the iPhone. Personally, I find the iPhone keypad is just too small for my fingers and I make too many mistakes typing with it.

I can also download movies/TV shows from iTunes and BBC’s iPlayer and watch them on my TV via an Apple Composite cable.

The negatives

Okay, there’s the good bits but are there any drawbacks? Well the battery is a bit poor just like the iPhone, it runs out far too quickly and honestly I think the price of it in the UK is still too high; £429 is a serious amount of money and I’m not sure it’s worth that much – the price I paid in the US worked out at £350 which I think is much more reasonable.

iTunes is a big negative too; I don’t like being locked into iTunes, navigating around it is a chore and I think, generally the prices are too high for what it is. I generally think that paying £3.50 to rent a film or £9.99 to buy and nearly £2 per TV show episode is too high and I long for Netflix or something similar to launch in the UK.

Summary

As soon as the iPad was announced I thought it was a great idea but when the UK prices were released I was completely put off. I had envisaged the price point being low enough- say £300-350 – to make it an easy purchase decision.

As more apps get launched specifically designed for the iPad, I think it’ll become increasing more useful. I just hope the 2nd generation iPad doesn’t come out too soon considering I’ve just bought this one, but knowing apple I imagine it’s just around the corner.

eBay HQ

One of the reasons for a holiday to California, besides the thrill of driving up Big Sur in a convertible, was to get to San Francisco and to discover what all the fuss was about and why so many start-ups are located there.

Part of me hoped I’d just stumble across Mark Zuckerberg in the street and he’d offer me a job – obviously that didn’t happen but I did manage to find out where most of the big offices where and geekily get some souvenir photos of those famous logos.

facebook HQ

San Francisco

Generally speaking, San Francisco was pretty cool and I had a great time there. The weather was certainly better than Manchester’s but I did feel like some of Manchester‘s areas (e.g. Northern Quarter or Canal Street) do hold their own against their admittedly bigger counterparts in San Francisco’s Mission and Castro areas.

Silicon Valley

It was strange driving around the physical home of the internet and Silicon Valley felt like, in the nicest possible way, a giant industrial estate – with the exception of Facebook’s offices which seemed to be in the middle of a housing estate.

I couldn’t help but feel like these giant offices could have been physically located anywhere in the world and that when the time comes for me to start a business for myself I don’t necessarily have to do it in Palo Alto or Mountain View – I could quite feasibly do it anywhere I wanted.

Having said that, I do still feel the pull of Silicon Valley, and I do feel like it is the place to go and prove your worth in this industry and I would love the opportunity to give it a go there.

Yahoo offices

Google Road - just outside their HQ

Your thoughts

Was it too geeky to take those photos outside what are essentially just company offices? I suspect a fair few of you will think that it was and some of you may have been in web geek heaven like I was, either way I’d love to know.

In my opinion, all the talks were interesting; and as front-end developer, I think it’s fair to say I was the main audience for a lot of the talks which consisted of the following topics:

• Designing for mobile devices
• SEO
• HTML5 APIs (read, JavaScript)
• Graceful degradation vs progressive enhancement in browsers (CSS)

Designing for mobile devices

Mobile is a big topic right now and it was really refreshing to hear a mobile developer (with actual experience) in Ben Childs from Common Agency, tell us that creating separate mobile experiences for different mobile devices was the way forward, as opposed to doing nothing ‘because the site looks okay on an iPhone’. I use my mobile phone (iPhone) a lot to check websites and yes, the scaling of websites is cool but frankly, I don’t need to see absolutely everything the same as on my iMac when I just want to check the football scores or the TV listings.

Sidenote: Sadly, I don’t get to do nearly any mobile interface work due to client’s budgets not stretching that far, but I think that will change in the next year or two as the usage of the mobile internet increases and clients realise they can make more money if they cater for different audiences.

SEO

“The Hodge” gave a very interesting talk about SEO (and bagels), and once again it was nice to hear from a speaker who clearly knows what they’re doing.; it was great to hear an SEO professional denounce a lot of SEO practices as ‘bullshit’. The majority of people in this industry are not this honest; which is a pity.

It was also really refreshing to hear a bit of humour from this speaker; and I have to admit this was my favourite talk of the night.

HTML5 (aka JavaScript)

‘Oh bore off HTML5′, I hear you say, ‘we’ve had enough of you already.’ Well, yes, the truth is that HTML5 kind of sucks, we have a lot of new (borderline useless tags) but, there is a silver lining; the real selling point of HTML5 will be these HTML5 APIs which will allow us to pass off a lot of work we do in JavaScript to the browser; of course, we’ll all still be writing JavaScript – just not as much of the mundane stuff (hopefully).

Some of the people I was with did seem to get a little lost and, dare I say, a tad bored during some of the more technical parts of Remy Sharp’s presentation. While I find it quite fascinating that, in the near future, form validation could be done by the browser I don’t think that everyone else shared that enthusiasm.

Graceful degradation in browsers (CSS)

By far the most controversial talk of the night was from the headliner, Andy Clarke.  His point: for years (7 to be precise) we’ve been told to progressively enhance websites; make it work in IE6 then add visual flourishes to Safari/Chrome/Firefox browsers but his idea is to flip that approach and make the site look best in better browsers then successfully downgrade the site so it looks decent in IE6/7. Will IE users miss out? Probably not, Clarke noted because in the real world people using websites don’t check that it works in IE6 and Firefox; they just use the browser they use and don’t really care if it looks a bit different on someone else’s machine.

Will you be able to adopt this approach on every project starting from today? No, probably not, but you can definitely start to do it with some clients and you should definitely be starting to educate clients about the browser differences and why websites shouldn’t look the same in IE6/7 as they do in Firefox 3.6. People don’t expect the mobile web to look as good on their 10 year old Nokia as it does on an iPhone so why should it be any different with desktop browsers.

Summary

There was a lot of talk at last night’s Speak the Web about how good it was to have something going on up north for a change – and it really was. Fun as it is to take a trip to London/Brighton for a web conference it does start to get expensive so the fact that some local boys put on something for us Northerners was really cool.

From reading the blurb on the website, I got the impression at the conference was to be more like a gig than a traditional conference and that’s exactly how it was. There was a headlining act and some some supporting speakers leading up to them; it felt very relaxed and informal and I think it was definitely the right approach. The fact that it was in the pub meant everyone was a little more lubricated  with alcohol and consequently more prepared to have open and frank discussions about the talks once they’d finished.

I felt the price was right here too; £20 for a few hours of inspiration is a good deal as far as I’m concerned and I’d be more than happy to attend another Speak the Web should the organisers choose to keep this juggernaut running.

Disclaimer

I feel I have to point out that I know both of the organisers, Rich and Dan, either through work or through Northern Digitals; but this has not coloured my review in any way.

These posts, collected from around the web, start with the oldest first. Links like these can be found in my delicious feed or by subscribing to this site’s RSS feed.

The $300 Million Button

Guy changes one button on a website which leads to a lot of extra revenue. Hooray for usability.

10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites

Smashing magazine lays down the law on the corporate website.

The $50 logo experiment

“Here’s the truth, though, and why all the good designers need to relax: the vast majority of the self-described designers on sites like CrowdSpring aren’t really designers.”

What I learned redesigning the Campaign Monitor newsletter

This reads like a fantastic how-to design HTML emails.

Independent Software Development

Good insight into what it’s like to set-up and run your own software (web-app) house by Garrett Dimon of Sifter.

College vs Start-up

Daniel Teller sums up my opinion on this subject pretty well.

Why payment prior to launch is so important

A good case study about an awkward client not paying up from Sarah Parmenter.

Why I think SEO is bullshit

Sam Brown lays down the law on SEO.

Dear American Airlines

Ah, I remember the complete storm this article caused. The follow-up, Dear Dustin Curtis, is worth a read too. As is the follow-up follow-up, The Incompetence of American Airlines & The Fate of Mr. X.

Link Building from A-Z

If in 2010 you wish to stop paying your SEO provider then read this, then read the rest of the articles at SEOMoz.

Promoting your product or service with banner ads – is it worth it?

Really interesting write up about experience using ad banners/landing pages from CampaignMonitor.

Stop Password Masking

Jakob Nielsen calls for the end of the asterisked password field.

How to Increase Sign-ups by 200%

Simple tip about how 37Signals increased sign-ups with a little A/B testing on some copy.

The World’s Best Web Designers Are Unknown

John O’Nolan let’s .NET magazine have it after their inane article about the top 20 web designers in the world.

Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

SEO’ers came in for some right stick in 2009, first Sam Brown, then Derek Powazek kicked their bums. The follow-up, SEO FAQ is equally good.

Never knowingly undersold?

How John Lewis tackle the shop v e-shop rivalry and a short summary of the problem.

8 ways we increased ecommerce sales by 10,000%

Case study from Headscape (boagworld) on the increased sales of one of their clients.

9 usability mistakes even the big boys make

Some nice examples of common user interface/experience errors on big websites.

Top Tips for Account Managers

Ed Baldy provides digital account managers with some useful guidelines.

The HTML5 syntax options problem

To me, HTML5 just seems like a bit of a mess and it would appear that Robert Nyman, kinda agrees.

The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign

Review of apple’s online store’s checkout forms being redesigned.

Stuff I’ve learned at Microsoft

Sriram Krishnan, a Microsoft employee tells us what he’s learnt from working there for 5 years.

Last year, I went to FOWD as a full-time employee – I didn’t know anyone and although I came away inspired I felt I missed out a lot by not getting involved socially. This year however, I knew a few people courtesy of the Manchester-based meetup group, Northern Digitals. Having people I knew in close proximity to discuss the talks with did make a huge difference and definitely made the time more enjoyable.

Anyway, onto the talks. Some of the talks were great and some weren’t so great. I suppose this is obvious: inevitably, some of the talks will be good and some will be bad. I thought some of the talks gave me some real inspiration and some bored me to tears. I don’t wish to focus on the negative aspects so I’ll briefly get that bit over with.

I felt that some of the lowlights were:

• Presenters displaying their portfolios when they should have been making a point
• Presenters having exciting talks ruined by the fact that they were reading the presentation from a piece of paper
• Sponsors Microsoft, heavily labouring the point with their presentation about their new product Surface

Okay enough negativity, here’s my highlights:

• Talks that inspired me to go away and think about my personal design process
• Talks that gave me the fuel to tell clients no and how to explain why
• Talks that re-opened my eyes to the accessibility issues on the web
• The open bar at the after party

In particular, I thought the talks by Robin Christopherson, Mike Kus, and Mark Boulton were fantastic and justified the ticket price on their own.

Sponsorship

A quick point about sponsorship. FOWD is a sponsored event and allows its main sponsors a small presentation spot. These spots went to Microsoft and GoodBarry. Microsoft’s presentation was dreadful – the speaker was a good presenter but the topic was dull and frankly annoying however I felt that GoodBarry’s presentation was excellent – it was not a heavy handed sales job rather it really seemed to offer something entertaining. Any companies thinking of sponsoring an event in the future would do well to listen to/watch GoodBarry’s presentation for pointers.

The point of conferences

Overall, I felt 2008′s conference was ever so slightly better: Certainly this year there was no knockout talk whereas for me last year’s Designing the User Experience Curve by Andy Budd blew me away and actually changed my thought process but I don’t feel it fair to compare different years to each other – they were different and offered different things but they did have a few things in common:

• I came away from FOWD feeling inspired – just like I did last year.
• I have talked incessantly to my (long-suffering) girlfriend about every little detail of FOWD since returning home – just like I did last year.
• I left feeling part of a community and not like I was alone struggling to make the web better place

Therefore, I conclude that FOWD did its job and there’s a very good chance I’ll attend next year also. It’s also reconfirmed to me that conferences and in particular, presenters can be interesting so in that aspect, it has definitely encouraged me to go to further conferences.

Other reviews from the web

• How To Always Enjoy A Conference
• FOWD ‘09 – Let’s look forward, retrospectively

Did you attend this year’s FOWD conference? What were your thoughts?

The developer/designer who created this campaign clearly thought it would be funny to spell out ‘Wanker St’ one letter at a time with the HTML’s spacer GIFs.

In the past, I’ve talked about ensuring your website is mistake free and it’s easy to see how important it is to triple-check everything or your hilarious (read: offensive) internal jokes could be exposed to your customers and cost you a lot of money.

Thanks to Dave at Sluug for this sending me this email.

Having done a lot of reading up about different wireless routers only served to increase my confusion on the subject matter. I live in quite a big house (3 floors, 4 bedrooms) and trying to find the right information on whether any of these wireless devices would work in my situation was difficult.

• Did the wireless router have a modem?
• Would the range be good enough?
• What the hell where these N,G,G+ standards?
• Would it work with my imac

The other options

I considered Apple’s Time Capsule but decided the price of it (£199) was just too high. I then considered Apple’s Airport Extreme. Again, the price for this seemed high at £119 and considering for an extra £80, I’d get automatic Time machine backups, it seemed like a waste.

Other options, from companies such as Netgear, D-link were also available but despite their websites stating that their hardware would work with macs, I also read elsewhere that they required extra adapters/wireless cards for optimal performance.

Airport Express to the rescue

After speaking to my boss, he told me that most likely, Apple’s Airport Express option would be good enough but, at £65 it seemed so cheap in comparison to Apple’s other similar products and the reviews I read about it made it seem like this was a really limited piece of hardware.

One week after buying the Airport Express, I am really happy. I have wif-fi in my house at last and I can, in theory, pick up my imac and move it round the house at a whim. This was proved when on Friday afternoon, my entire office moved upstairs to the top floor where it will remain until the end of this/next month when our main bedroom (my old office) gets renovated.

Set-up

Set-up was really easy too, it must have took about 10 minutes. For the record, I am the type of person who doesn’t like to read instructions and thankfully, I didn’t have to, I simply popped in the CD and everything just set itself up with the me just clicking continue every now and again.

Some facts/details

If you’re thinking of buying an Airport Express maybe these details will help.

• My house is a 3 storey Victorian mid terrace, it has plenty of brick walls and some studded walls. The floors are generally original floorboards.
• The Airport Express has no modem so it must be plugged in to one. This means two pieces of electrical items plugged in at once.

When PC-based, I used FeedDemon and found it to be excellent and I’ve had similar experiences with NetNewsWire on the mac. I found them both to be far superior to using a web based service.

The feeds I read

Here are the RSS feeds I am currently subscribed to:
My RSS Subscriptions

The file is a zip file containing an OPML (type of XML) file. To use the file simply unzip the file, open up your feed reader of choice and ‘import’ the unzipped contents of the file.

Hopefully, you will found some great blogs that you’ve never heard of before.