Carsonified, the well known and hugely respected web events company in Bath recently announced a two day event specifically for students and web entrepreneurs who are in the process of launching a web app called Summer Camp to take place at their offices on Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st July. Due to the fact the event is to take place at their offices, places were limited to 8 and applications were invited via the Summer Camp website.

The event was announced on 1st July and I heared of it through Ryan’s Twitter feed and applied the same day, with the thought “that you’ve got to be in it to win it”, not really expecting anything. As the application form was live for a week or so, I  kind of forgot about it until Friday 10th July when I remembered that that was the day that the winners would be announced.

I was completely surprised to receive an email from Carsonified saying that I was one of the lucky ones and would be heading off to Bath. I’m really looking forward to learning from some of the best in the industry and it should help a great deal both in my studies and further into my career.

Needless to say, I will report back here after the event.

Microsoft have today announced that in their upcoming release of Office 2010 that they will continue to use Word to render their HTML emails, once again going against the grain of the web community and specially the Email Standards Project.

HTML email is not perfect by any means and in some ways could be compared to website building around 10 years ago at the start of the standards campaign. With the huge range of email clients available it is a difficult task designing an effective HTML email that will display well in the majority of email clients and also degrade well so that the content is still viewable when images are turned off or in a client that only shows only plain text emails, and now with this decision Microsoft are making it even harder for the next five years or so. Microsoft Outlook is a widely used client in business and us designers will have to struggle to ensure support for this client whilst a lot of clients move towards using standards and increasing CSS support in email. With Internet Explorer still being a pain to get designs to render properly in, and Microsoft seemingly oblivious to a number of these concerns, it looks like they have ignored the general consensus again.

A campaign was started by the Email Standards Project and quickly created a buzz on Twitter as people announced their astonishment at the decision and after a day of condemnation and much gnashing of teeth, Microsoft announced their response to the concerns on the Outlook Blog by basically saying “thanks for telling us we’re wrong but we’re going to ignore you anyway”, as only Microsoft can.

First off, this is my first post in a while and it’s all my fault – must do better!

Just a quick update for this post, as myprevious posts show I’m now finished university for the summer and am once again working at Reach Further here in sunny Leeds. It looks like a busy summer as things are going well at work, with plenty to do.

I’m also planning to brush up on my skills outwith work by attending events like DrupalCamp UK and also Future of Web Design in Glasgow. I do have other posts lined up over the next couple of weeks so will get back in the swing of posting on a more regular basis.

As my first year of university comes to an end, I was reading the latest issue of .net magazine and came across the article written by Jack Osborne about what to do after leaving university in order to gain employment within the industry. Although I’ve not yet reached that stage yet, there is a few tips that anyone at any stage of education can implement now in order to increase chances.

Portfolio:

Jack states that the portfolio of any work should be in the right order and as good as it can be as that is where potential employers will look first. Students are often encouraged to leave out university work from their portfolio but often that is all students have, and goes back to the old adage that they can’t get a job due to lack of experience but no-one’s willing to offer that experience. In my portfolio, two thirds of it is university based as that is all I have at the moment but another useful tip which I will implement over the summer is to “fake it”. By creating websites for imaginary clients it will give me a chance to improve both my design and coding skills as well as boosting my portfolio.

About:

The About Me section of any website is important as it is the individual’s chance to sell themselves to potential clients and employers. It is important to talk yourself up and is the perfect opportunity to highlight any achievements and explain your strengths. The About section of this site isn’t great and I will take some of Jack’s advice on board and re-write that section over the next few weeks. I’ve never been comfortable talking about myself but is something I will have to improve on and re-write that section completely.

Social Networks:

The use of social networks can also boost a designer’s profile by becoming known by others within the industry and increase interest in their work. The latest trend appears to be Twitter, with a high number of designers being active on the site. Follow famous faces within the industry in order to gauge what they’re working on as well as people within your local area in order to connect with like-minded people within your industry who may be interested in collaboration or referring work. Sites should link to these profiles from order to highlight to visitors that you are on these sites and networks and this is something I have not done yet apart from the twitter widget on the homepage of this site, but will be incorporated into a new about page.

Conclusion:

Although the article was aimed at university graduates I think it contains a lot of tips that could be implemented by anybody currently in education, as a way of increasing their chances of gaining employment. Personally, I’ll be taking on board some of these tips such as re-writing my about page and providing links to my social network profiles to build up connections from those as well as increasing my portfolio through real-world examples as well as “faking it” to practice as well as experimenting with some new techniques.

I’m also quite lucky in that I have employment during my holidays from University which give me some experience of working in the real world as well as my univeresity education which should stand me in good stead.

Are there any other ideas I should be working on to increase employment chances, what did you do to gain your first job within the industry?

Photo: Yersinia from Flickr, used under Creative Commons

Don’t know how anyone would achieve this but it’s certainly illegal!

With the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 and the even more recent announcement that the browser will be included in Windows Updates, the issue of Internet Explorer 6 rears it’s ugly head again. As people within the web industry we know all about the issues we face surrounding IE6 and have done for a while now, but will this latest release see the end of IE6 or will it be hanging around for a while yet.

The fact that Microsoft will begin pushing the download to the users will see many users upgrade from IE7 to IE8 and the latest version which is an improvement on previous versions. But if users haven’t upgraded to IE7 more than two years after it’s release, then why would they decide to upgrade now? There are many reasons why IE6 still occupies around 17% of the market, and a lot of these users won’t care or won’t know how to upgrade. To us within the industry IE6 is a major pain, but to many users who use it then it works perfectly fine for them.

With this new version, many designers and developers have decided to stop supporting IE6 altogether in a bid to get users upgrading, and without getting into what supporting it actually means, this could be a positive move. There are many ways to alert users to the fact that they’re using an old browser such as offering different stylesheets to give users a different look to the site which can include a built in alert stating that the site works better in a more up to date browser, or javascript notices that also alert users to their old browser. However, one of the latest ways of getting users to upgrade is a little sneaky. IE6 Update mimcks the official alert bar which is normally used to tell users about missing content such as ActiveX controls or a flash player upgrade, but is used to tell IE 6 users to upgrade.

Now I’m all for getting rid of IE 6 and it would make life easier if it wasn’t hanging around and causing us problems but to trick and deceive users is the wrong way to get people to upgrade. As stated above, many user’s don’t have a choice in what browser they use and in the case of the older generation, can’t afford to upgrade and may well get put off the internet altogether if this yellow bar appeared all over the net. The good thing about the internet is about bringing people together, and this has the ability to tear us apart in some cases.

It’s not all bad though, it won’t be long before IE 6 disappears as Microsoft reduces support for Windows XP and as many organisations have a policy of running software one version below the latest version may see some upgrade their systems to IE 7 within the next few months, and by this time next year I think the market share of IE 6 will have reduced greatly.

Do you think IE6 Update is a good idea? Leave a comment below to let me know what you think.

Having been a fan of Elliot Jay Stocks‘ work for quite a while, I was pleased to hear last year that he was writing a book, and instantly placed my order when it was released. Titled Sexy Web Design, the book guides the reader through a project for a fictional web conference which requires a website building.

As the book is focussed more on the design aspect of website building, there isn’t a single line of code within the book as Elliot concentrates on the design considerations which make a good site such as the layout, colour, interaction theory as well as the stages that are involved in undertaking a project for a client. The book starts off with an initial brief from “the client” which outlines what they wish the site to be when it’s finished, and as it is a very short brief, Elliot then describes a number of techniques aimed at extracting more information from a client in order to help in the design phase as much as possible. What follows this is a comprehensive look at the various stages of the build including the initial hand-drawn sketches to wireframes which could be sent to a client for approval all the way through to a finished design. No aspect of the site-building process is left out with topics covered including:

• The Client Brief
• Responding to a Brief
• Research
• Sitemaps
• Wireframes
• Inspiration Techniques & Tips
• Art and Design Principles
• Mock-Ups with Photoshop
• Gaining client approval
• Deliverables

No aspect of the site is left out and Elliot covers everything from typography considerations to browser size and layout options all the way down to the use of icons to add extra weight to the design. Peppered throughout the book are some wonderful examples from around the web of the techniques and ideas that are presented. There are some wonderful screenshots of navigation options, colour styles, typography and icons that perfectly illustrate the points being made.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone and is of particular interest to someone like me who is just starting out in the  web design industry as it has some very good tips which I will be incorporating into my work in the future.

After a browse of my RSS reader this afternoon, I came across this post from net tuts+ and as someone who has recently completed year one of university it was an interesting read. The article discusses the benefits and drawbacks of attending university to learn web development and includes real-life experiences of people who went to university to study computing.

Overall the article is positive about university attendance although not just from the perspective of learning the techniques to become a web designer or developer, but also from other aspects such as the social side and the broadening of horizons that university can bring.

The reasons that I decided to attend university were that at the time it came to apply I felt that I wasn’t ready to enter the workforce straight away and felt that a university setting would be more beneficial in the long term. As the article touches on though, universities struggle to keep up with the latest technologies and in the web industry the pace of change is faster than most other industries. This is true of my university in that some of the techniques are a bit out-dated but by doing additional reading of blogs and article sites to keep up to date with the latest changes in technique and technology. Another aspect that benefitted me personally was the fact that I had some experience before and during my time at university which gives me real-life examples and experience to compliment my teaching at university, which I would recommend to anyone as it has certainly benefitted me.

The other option instead of attending university would be to go into employment and build up a portfolio of work to show potential employers the abilities that someone possesses and this can be a very beneficial way of going about it but at the end of the day I think it should come down to the individual and the choice that they decide to make. Although I will say that if you decide to attend university then don’t just blindly follow the lecturers and what theey tell you, it’s important to do some activity on your own such as blog reading and listening to podcasts in order to broaden your knowledge will go along way. Get yourself an RSS reader and subscribe to as many web design/development related blogs and sites to supplement the knowledge gained in class.

Photo: Used under Creative Commons from Flickr, original here