As you may have noticed already my old site trans-fusion.co.uk has regenerated in a Doctor Who style into keanrichmond.com. Keanrichmond.com is essentially the same great website but with a new name and a shiny new face. For the moment I want to explain some of the reasons behind the changes I have made to the website, and why I’ve made these changes after only a few months since the last design was launched.
Continue reading “Welcome keanrichmond.com” »

It’s soon to be the end of an era as this will be the last post written on trans-fusion.co.uk. Over the past few months I have been working to redesign and rebuild this website on a new domain and it is nearly ready to be unveiled. I don’t want to write too much about the new website now or the reasons behind the forthcoming change in domain, as I would rather do that after the site is live.

However I do want to look back on what was the first domain I ever owned, and is still part of only a small set of domains I own today. Apologies if this may end up sounding like an obituary, but just indulge me.
Continue reading “Leaving trans-fusion” »

Accessibility is becoming a more important part of a web developer’s job. Yet accessibility is notoriously a hard thing to get right and it’s only getting harder.

If you’ve ever read the WCAG specification you would know that even for some of the most technically minded people the specifications are a difficult read. It’s not just the WCAG specification that suffers this way but the XHTML/HTML specifications read the same. Luckily for us there are online tools that mean we don’t have to read through hundreds of pages to know what we need to do to get everything right.

This isn’t true in the case of accessibility, unlike coding standards the accessibility guidelines cover both design and mark-up and online tools are only able to check mark-up. The tools do their best to advise on the areas that apply to design, or at least they did…
Continue reading “Where’s Bobby” »

Long form design is one of the most challenging aspects of my job, this is in part due to the restrictions of styling these elements, the most difficult being the select box.

This does not bother me so much as long as I am able to give balance to the form to make it usable and fit well within the design. This is not so easy as Internet Explorer does some odd things to Check boxes and Radio buttons.
Continue reading “IE breaks my radio” »

It is very important to present a design to a client in best way possible so that they can visualise how the design will translate to the end product. The design can only communicate so much to a client, it is difficult to easily incorporate a sites narrative and interactions into a design, and it’s is usually impractical to do so.

How it was

Since I started as a web developer I have simply supplied a client with a high quality JPEG image of their new website design, usually via email, to view on their PC or Mac. This appeared to work well enough, communicating such common elements as layout, fonts and colour. But is that enough? Is it possible to provide more information to a client in a design without jumping into the build phase?
Continue reading “Designing for Clients” »

Today the following post arrived in my RSS Inbox:

http://www.shauninman.com/archive/2008/05/05/css_qualified_selectors

Shaun Inman is a leading voice on the web, so when he talks about proposing new features to the CSS Working Group a lot of people will listen. His idea about the creation of CSS Qualified Selectors are well thought-out and his examples more than justify the proposals. Anything that reduces the number of unique ID’s and classes in HTML code can only help with building and maintaining websites.

It’s true that it will be a long time till we can take advantage of this, if the proposals are accepted. But in my view the idea would be a great addition to the CSS specification.

It’s been a while since the news broke of Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo, but today all the speculation is over as Microsoft has walked away from the merger. It appears Mirosoft’s valuation of £24.1 billion is too cheap for a seemingly failing company like Yahoo.

When the news broke I was positive that a Yahoo/Microsoft merger would only benefit Internet users. I understand most people see Microsoft as the big bad software company, and that may be true. However Microsoft Live, the companies online arm, cannot be tainted in the same way. Instead in the online world this honour goes to Google.
Continue reading “Microsoft gives up on Yahoo” »

Unfortunately time to post regularly has been hard to come by recently as I’m working flat out on the next version of this website. Also plans are afoot for a of a series of posts centered around a single subject, this will come as soon as a find a spare couple of hours to write it.

For this post I want to state my views on the growing hype around CSS3.

Firstly CSS3 looks awesome, and will very likely change the way sites look and how they are built. It’s a pity that we still have such a long wait till we get to play with it. At the moment the specifications are still being worked on, so until they are finished we don’t know exactly what we’re getting, but even when these are released we have more time to wait.
Continue reading “CSS3 how long do we have to wait?” »

From the people behind the Photoshop tutorial site PSDTuts comes NetTuts, a new tutorial site focusing on web based developments. Hopefully this site will follow the successful template set by it’s sister site PSD Tuts and provide well written tutorials with good downloadable examples all surrounded in a clean design void of obtrusive ads.

Well the event that I have been looking forward to for the past two months has ended, and overall the experience has been a good one. As I’ve posted previously I will try to answer some of the questions most newbie’s have about conferences as well as going through my own experiences in as concise a manner as I can:
Continue reading “Future of Car Customisation Software Conference” »