Manchester web designer Phil Thompson
RSS is something I use everyday for my own personal use that speeds up my use of the internet tenfold. Sadly, most people outside the industry still haven’t cottoned on to it yet. So I’m going to try help you to explain it to them.
Front-end development i.e. creating the XHTML/CSS for websites is my speciality. Yes, I also do PHP, MySQL and JavaScript but my heart lies with XHTML/CSS so much so that I’ve gotten to be quite good at it. Therefore, I thought it would be helpful to document how I typically go about creating the XHTML/CSS for a website.
In web design, I care most about the state of the (X)HTML, I like my sites to validate for a couple of reasons.
Dave Shea, creator or CSS Zen Garden, has redesigned his personal website, mezzoblue.
I live in Manchester, and I absolutely love it. I think it’s so great that loads of people should come and visit to see the city’s sights. So why does Manchester’s new tourism website visitmanchester.com not impress me in the slightest?
I can easily imagine myself becoming addicted to YouTube, quitting my job and spending the rest of my life watching fake amateur video blogs or kids robot dancing.
In fact I’ve just spent that last 5 minutes watching a guy who took a picture of himself everyday for the past 6 years then spliced it all up together - it’s hypnotic.
This week I embarked on an experiment to try and see if I could improve the number of people clicking on the ‘Zoom Image’ link that features underneath all product images on the product details page on the JJB Sports website.
The Zoom link is a very common feature on ecommerce sites therefore, you’d expect it to be highly used by the general public. I monitor everything on site with Google Analytics and I can tell you that less than 0.5% of people on the JJB site either click the zoom image text link below the image or the click the actual image.
A month ago I wrote that little design changes can make a big difference to conversion and now here’s the conclusive proof.
This week I discovered the John Lewis website and I must say it has mightily impressed me. The only thing that troubles me is the HTML/Javascript code lying beneath.
Admittedly, isn’t as awful as some (we’ve all seen worse) it isn’t as forward thinking as the website would suggest. A quick View Source reveals the culprit… Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 7.0
Whenever I tell somebody in Manchester that I work in Wigan, they can’t fathom it. They think it’s such a long way to go to work everyday (despite the fact that many people make the reverse trip!)
For me, the task of designing websites and building them is really enjoyable so being given the opportunity to do exactly that for a big company is a no-brainer.
The other reason, is that I wanted to prove to the world that designing websites in the correct manner: accessible, usable, conforming to web standards was the way forward and futhermore that by designing sites this way the company behind the sites wouldn’t lose any sales.
In his article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Re-align Cameron Moll talked about not redesigning a site completely and certainly not just for aesthetically reasons but mroe a redesign (or realignment) should be done purely for the purpose of improving the goals of a website.
Really small, some might say insignificant design changes can have large effects on your conversion rates, for instance at work last week, at the request of a colleague, I moved the add to basket form from below the product description - which for most people was below the 1024*768 page-fold - and low and behold the percentage of people adding items to their basket increased dramatically.
A small change plus another small change and another and so on and so on add up to a big change but without the disadvantage of alienating your customers who have to get used to your old design. By slightly changing certain aspects of you site you can upgrade your customer’s experience hopefully without them noticing anything has changed.
In my designs, I tend to use floats, as opposed to relative/absolute positioning, as I find it gives a design more power and a greater ability to scale vertically.
When I first approached CSS I couldn’t for the life of me understand how floats worked. My main struggle was trying to comprehend why floating something to the left or right led to so many other items being disrupted and not being cleared.
For the most part football (Americans, read soccer) websites are some of the worst I’ve seen from professional organisations.
The obvious reason for their appalling nature is that the people in charge have little knowledge of what makes a good information-based website. Certainly the web design agencies they hire seem to have no clue whatsoever.
In my time, I’ve read quite a few computing text books. On my degree course, I read lots of awful books on boring subject matter like 3D computer graphics and IT management strategies, and in my spare time I’ve read a lot of interesting books based around web design/development and all that entails. This book is my favourite so far. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to a new blog, img is everything. This is the personal website of me, UK web designer/developer Phil Thompson. Currently, I live in Manchester and work in Wigan for JJB Sports, doing all the sorts of tasks I’ll hopefully be preaching about on this website.
The previous incarnation of a Phil Thompson blog existed at www.doubleonegative.com, where I blogged from June 2004 to November 2005. That blog’s purpose was to document my rise from lowly student to a fully-fledged Web Designer, as that process seems to have bloomed it’s necessary to move the blog away from that location to here. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, I briefly talked about the theory behind the testing I carried out for my degree project on CMS. Today I’ll mention the specific problems I found and how I counteracted them. Read the rest of this entry »
<img />... is the online home of Manchester web designer / web developer Phil Thompson.
A mini-update of recent work.
See my portfolio for more work