Webby week

Well lots have been going on in the web space with me lately, some I can talk about, others I can't just yet! Here are two bits of exciting stuff! Mum and Dad's Taupo Holiday House website is now launched! I did the original website as one of my first Natcoll assignments, but now it needed some updates and a bit of a refresh of design, and this is the result: http://taupo.radfordnz.net. It should also help them out with search engines and stuff too. Although at this stage it still needs some IE debugging, which is one of the struggles of developing it in a Mac environment - as much as I LOVE Macs and Firefox, and wish the rest of the world did too, you can't have a website that is broken in IE..!

And the other big news is that in September, Kirti and I are off to the Web Directions conference - yay! SO exciting because Andy Clarke is talking and I've wanted to see him speak for so long now. And I feel real lucky cause I have already been to a web conference this year, but get to go to another one - and I love Sydney so it's a great opportunity to go back there :-)

Webstock - conference Day Two

Wow what an awesome conference! Russ Weakley delivered a very funny and informative presentation on letting go and allowing the users to control their own experience. He related it back to working with one of the Australian museums which wanted to structure their information by department - but this of course isn't how people will look for the information when using the site. So he was like "Well what if we tagged pages and then people could search for them and related pages by tags". And then bringing this to the next level by allowing users to comment and add tags themselves.

Heather Hesketh talked about Progressive Development - Gradual small changes, rather than large redesigns, and scheduled for say quarterly or monthly. This is really interesting because the general impression I've had from clients is that they want the project to be just finished, and we have been trying to encourage them to treat their site almost like a living thing, it needs attention regularly.

Ben Goodger did a talk on Firefox, the history and also showed a demo of Firefox 2, which looks great. I love one of the new features - if it, or the computer, crashes it reopens with all the tabs that you had open restored. There have been times when I have had 15 tabs open, and lost them all because something crashed and I hadn't got round to reading or bookmarking them yet!

Tony Chor from Microsoft did a good presentation of IE7, which is of course a huge improvement on IE6. I don't think the crowd were really impressed because I'd say most, if not all, Firefox users and IE7 doesn't really have anything that Firefox doesn't already. But I think it's awesome because most internet users only have and only know about IE, so it will be really great for them, and for our jobs!

Then there were drinks and nibbles, following by dinner, followed by Odessa playing and dancing. There were some gorgeous kids there who loved the music and were just dancing by themselves!!

More photos are of course on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/webstock/

Webstock - conference Day One

I am so exhausted! It was an awesome, full on, day. Probably the highlight of the day was Joel Spolsky's talk "Shiny geegaw vs great design", which was very similar content to Kathy Sierra's workshop that I went to the day before. Essentially - make an awesome experience for the user.

After lunch was the 8x5 sessions, which I was taking part in. My talk was on Web Standard and .net - which is a pretty contriversial topic!! To be honest, 5 minutes isn't long enough, and I think 5 minutes wasn't long enough for any of us because we all had really in-depth topics. But it was fun making it fit into that, and it was great having the fast-paced stuff!

I chose to go to Rachel McAlpine's stream which I found really interesting. She really brought writing for the web down to street-level. The fact is that anyone and everyone these days write content for their website or intranet. So she pulled out some basic guidelines for making that better - like using a lot of headings and making sure your main points are at the start of the paragraph.

Kelly Goto's talk was of course really good! Again, she brought up the whole user-centered design of applications and sites. Getting to know - really know - who will be using your application and what matters to them.

And, the Kiwis won in the Tim-Tam, Chit-Chat Trans-Tasman Taste-off! Yee-ah! Then the day finished up with cocktails :-)

Webstock - Kathy Sierra's workshop

To kick Webstock off, I went along to Kathy Sierra's Workshop - Creating Passionate Users. It was SO good that afterwards I ran to the office to tell the others all about it!! It is really exciting for me cause I now I have some really cool ideas of stuff we can do with Go Fetch! and make it better for people who register and use it. There was so much stuff that I learnt, and there is no way I could cover it all here, but here are some key cool things:

1. People are passionate about things in their lives, and this is characterised by certain behaviour. But we can also use this in a backwards way to spark people's interest in products/services and to keep their interest up.
2. For people to be interested and attracted to something there needs to be a brain-level reaction. Our brains react and pay attention to things that are:
   • Novel - something strange, different, unique.
   • Beautiful
   • Cute and innocent
   • Funny
   • Faces and facial expressions - and these don't need to be human faces it can be animals or drawings
   • Unresolved - things that make you go *huh?!*
   • Sexy
   • Scary
3. If things are written in conversational tone rather than facts and information then people pay attention much better.
4. Animation - we take notice of moving things and tonal changes. So this should only be used well to draw attention to a specific thing on the page.
5. So now we have people's attention, we need to retain it by giving them a compelling picture to aim towards ("That looks cool, yeah I want to do that!") and a way to get to it, an easy way to get started.
6. We love learning and understanding, so there needs to be a way for people to learn more and more about what they are aiming towards. Also to keep learning, the tool or site needs to be very unobtrusive so that people don't have to learn to use the tool, but instead focus on achieving their goal.
7. Games are really good at keeping people motivated by providing levels - and the same idea can be applied to our tools. They don't need to be as specific as levels, but people are continuously motived if they feel they have achieved something and are more able or get some reward afterwards.
8. If people feel they are part of a bigger picture or meaning then they will be more enthusatic. E.g. Coldplay and Fair Trade. And people will want to and encourage others to do things like wear the Fair Trade braclet or t-shirts.
9. Community is really important -for people to be able to interact, comment or have some part with others going through the same things.
10. And of course the most important bit of all, is that it isn't about us webdesigners, or about the tools that we are trying to sell, it is about how the people using the tool feel.

Redesign... finally!

Yay, my site is finally redesigned...! Not only has it been delayed because of spare time, but also because it took me a long time to decide what to do. You see at work I know that websites have to follow reasons, purposes and goals - and this applies to the content of the site as well as the look of the site.

So my first thing was - what is the reason for having a site?? And this was why I was initially slow in actually getting round to posting my very first entry. In the end I decided that my site was going to exist just because I wanted one. This, I think, is just as valid a reason for an individual as anything I come across for work. I am a webdesigner, so I do need a website. But also I come across stuff all the time that I want to comment on or make a statement on, and that is exactly what a blog is for.

So then, if my blog exists just for me, then the design I feel needs to reflect that. So what about me do I want to portray visually? I like so many things, so many artistic styles, etc. and again I was stuck! I seriously think that when you're a webdesigner that the worst client you can have is yourself!! Well again, one day I realised - why not use the things that are right under my nose every day?

I am a compulsive doodler. Apparently this is because I am a kinesthetic person and so I understand the world and information around me by doing. So I always need to be doing, and this comes out in doodling. So what a better thing to put on my site that is about me, than my dooles?!

I also loved this idea because I am on the computer all day at work, and the last thing I feel like doing when I am home is being on the computer! So I love the idea of using things that have been really drawn, not computer generated, and this is where I decided to bring in the paper texture. This paper is some of my favourite in my collection - one of those items that I like too much to use so it was still in pristine condition to scan in!

So here it is. Still not *quite* finished - still some tweeks to do - but here is my site with my doodles, all hand drawn and all uniquely me!

Webstock

WOW! I've just been accepted to speak at the Webstock conference in the 8x5 sessions!! WOW is just about right, I feel a mixture of excitement, nervousness, panic and joy! I'll be speaking on creating validated web standard applications in the Microsoft .net framework, which doesn't naturally lend itself to being web standard. Although the web team at Microsoft have been making leaps and bounds in catching up to the rest of the industry (especially with the .net 2 framework release end of last year), it does still take more work to get a .net application to fit within web standards. This is why most web standard applications are developed in PHP or Ruby (e.g. Flickr, Basecamp, etc.). So I have 5 minutes to speak on that!!

hmmmmm!

*whine*

Oh man... to be living in Britian or Europe would be cool right now. The @media 2006 conference looks sooo good! And altho the tickets aren't that expensive, it costs a minimum of $2500 return to the UK. I should be happy with what I have, I mean Webstock will be brilliant too. It's just that Andy Clarke's topic looks really cool and they seem to have a lot more design emphasis than WE05 had, and it's the design stuff I'd love to see more of. Combination of cool design and pushing the edges with CSS. Ummm... guess that means I should really get onto redoing my own design aye.

The magical powers of computer people

Today I decided to print out the wedding invites. My boss has been very generous and said I could print them out on the work colour printer which does a lovely job. So I start printing and almost every page gets stuck in the printer and need to reset the printer and print all over again... after 40 minutes I had 8 invites!!! Then my web-developer work mate comes back from lunch and I tell him what a frustrating time I've been having! And so he stands there, and the printer works absolutely perfectly!!

I am sure most of us can relate to this... you're having this HUGE problem or computer errors or something techincal like that, but as soon as someone like a developer, programmer, computer technician turns up the thing works fine and they look at you as if to say "what are you on?!" It's like they have this magical presence or something that makes machines obey!

Finally!

Okay finally I actually write something on here - hee hee Pauly should be happy!!! Seeing as he set it up so long ago and he's gotten real into blogging... then again he actually has an interesting life in Japan, and a digital camera... two things I'm lacking haha! So why have a blog at all then? I've thought about this long and hard and come to some main conclusions.

1. I can't be a web designer and not have a website! And a blog is an easy way to do that.
2. I hope to have some useful information for someone at some stage (oh so vague!). What I mean is that so much information you find on the internet is copied from other people so you always find the same information.
3. I have such a variety of interests that I thought it would be an interesting observation to how this blog takes shape.

A redesign is also in the plans. (Which are all in my head at this stage...!)