Forget design 'inspiration' - just stick to the basics

A lot of design tutorials tend to focus on the aspect of 'inspiration' - without much emphasis on the design process itself. For all the showy gradients and web 2.0 gloss, truly good design comes from an altogether different approach. [read more...]

Hexadecimal Colour Mnemonics

A new approach to remembering hex web colours?

For a fortunate few, working with hexadecimal colours comes naturally - my experience stems from working with colour palettes whilst programming in BASIC some 15 years ago. Thankfully, hex colour codes persist today in CSS, so my early experience means working with hex colour is second nature. But what about those less versed in hexadecimal? Perhaps a mnemonical system could be employed... [read more...]

Why is RSS adoption so abysmal amongst UK newspapers online?

Old media, meet new

The transition from old media to new media is inescapable, and for most the daily dose of news via the internet is now perhaps more common than the newspaper on the doorstep in the morning. Why then, are the RSS subscriber numbers so weak? [read more...]

How to spot a Windows fanboy

Clinging desperately to sinking ships

I was chatting to a friend (and long-time Windows supporter) on MSN earlier today – he was looking for a utility to extract .RAR archives on Windows. I thought there was an obvious (and easily obtainable) option – but, apparently not so much. [read more...]

Why Good Hosting is Important

Or, how a dedicated host cured all my Google woes

Google knows an awful lot about the web, and one of the things the Googlebot tracks is the response time of your pages. If you know where to look, Google will also gladly divulge their data on your site via the Webmaster console, hidden away in the ‘Crawl stats’ section of the diagnostic tab. [read more...]

Loggr: Timesheet generator in AJAX

(Well, technically DHTML. But AJAX sounds cooler)

One thing that any freelance worker or outside consultant needs is a means to track billable hours – i.e. the time spent working. Time management is a critical part of independent working, and there are a plethora of different ways of recording it – from paper sheets to fully integrated expense calculators that run the gamut. I was having trouble finding one that suited my needs – all time tracking software I’ve seen is either too difficult to use, too complex, or not free – so I decided to write my own. [read more...]

The biggest mistakes made by web design companies

Apart from trying to compete in the web design marketplace, of course...

Web design is a massively competitive area on the internet – it seems that every man and his dog is offering ‘fresh creative designs’ to ‘help grow your business online’. But why do so many of these sites run afoul of so many elementary errors? [read more...]

Click Survey Analysis & Heatmap

Interpretations and ramifications from a web design point of view

You may have seen the recent click survey featured on the front page of Digg.com - over 40,000 people participated and were invited to click on 8 different images - wherever they felt inclined to. We take a look at some of the results, and see what this means for web designers and usability analysts. [read more...]

Working with a limited font set on the web

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Typography and the web have never seen eye to eye - largely thanks to the limited type rendering capabilities of computers at the dawn of the web. Coupled with the academic (and non-design-oriented) bias of sites from this time, we're left with a legacy of a poor choice of fonts. [read more...]