Archive
Rant
1Feb
Last week Brendan Dawes posted about the UK design scene and caused a rather heated debate. I was in total agreement with what he had written, but certain comments about positive noise rang true. Is it simply the way we communicate doesn’t allow us to feel as if we can give negative comments, or is it our own view of ‘if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all’.
This week a website was launched, it was mentioned on twitter and gained a few congratulations. Personally I didn’t get it, the design seemed too simplistic, certain elements of cross browser compatibility didn’t seem well considered and I thought the redesign was no great improvement on the previous iteration. In my opinion the site also looked as if it was designed in the browser, something that is gaining a lot of positive promotion on the web. In my opinion it’s since web designers have been working this way I’ve seen a lack of creativity in some instances, but this is a completely different argument.
Continue reading “Damn my Britishness”
18Dec
One challenge of a web designer is informing clients of best practices and explain why sometimes what they want to do isn’t the best course of action. One of these best practices concerns audio on the web, or more specifically auto playing audio. Even after attempting to persuade them it is a bad idea they usually still want to go through with it. The only reason they want it is because they think it’s cool, not because it improves a website.
Continue reading “Shhhhhh”
15Dec
I’ve thought long and hard about how to kick off this post and put over a balanced argument but the point I want to make doesn’t really lend itself to that, so instead I’m going to just jump straight in:
Web experts are out of touch!
Now I don’t want to be controversial for the sake of it so I’ll explain my point of view, but first this needs some context.
Continue reading “We’re not stupid”
13Sep
This may get me in hot water but to be honest I’m getting pissed off with the constant hatred for IE6 from web professionals and the double standards this creates.
Users, users, users
So many professionals will talk about the user till they’re blue in the face, which is only right as we work in an industry where pleasing the user is the primary goal. But when IE6 is involved all this stuff just doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
Unfortunately many web developers have taken a strong stance against IE6, conducting what can only be called a witch hunt against the aging browser. Some of this mob arm themselves with morally questionable update messages or simply lock down a site to anyone using IE6. These are aggressive actions to take aimed firmly at the best interests of the developer and not the user.
Continue reading “Lay off IE6″