Barcamp Belfast

This event was good craic and was great to meet and talk to loads of local people with shared interests. Well done to Andy for a well organised event.

I did a talk at the event entitled ‘Keeping users happy’ that included some usability and customer relation tips. You can view the slides below (might follow up with a blog post dedicated to this so it makes more sense).

There was an interesting talk on scaling Rails by David Rice and a freelance talk by Brian O’Neil. All the talks were great but I these were the ones that most applied to me.

Silicon Ireland

Paddy Donnelly and I were down talking about The Big Word Project in Dublin. Great day and great people at the event. It was really interesting listening to Sean McGrath, he has some really interesting ideas regarding the current state of the web. We even got to do a TV spot for RTE news. Here’s an interview we recorded on the day.

CrunchLudd

After Silicon Ireland it was onto a (free)bar in Dublin to see some local startups. Some fantastic sites, some have been launched and some are launching shortly. Here’s my 2 picks of the bunch.

Toddle.ie

Beautifully designed app that creates mail/newsletter templates with ease

Muzu.tv

 Kind of a mash-up between (old-skool)MTV and YouTube. They have some big labels signed up already.

I had great fun attending all these events and thanks to all the organisers. Hope to see you at the next one.

Barcamp Belfast

Barcamp is happening on Saturday 21st June 9-5.30ish @ Queens in Belfast. If you’re in Northern Ireland/Ireland you should definitely come along. Barcamp is one of those events where anyone and everyone can talk at and it’s completely free to attend (I hear there might be pizza and beer available too thanks to the sponsors).

I’ve put my name down here to talk about ‘Something web designy’, which will have a web usability angle on it.

Find out more info on http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/BarCampBelfast.

You should be able to watch the event live http://www.mogulus.com/barcampbelfast

Silicon Ireland

Silicon Ireland is happening Thursday 26th June 9-4.30ish @ City North Hotel in Dublin. This will be aimed at startups and will bring together people to share their knowledge on this matter. Paddy Donnelly and I have been asked to come along to talk about The Big Word Project, which we’re looking forward to.

CrunchLudd, a TechCrunch and TechLudd mashup, is also happening in Dublin that night, after Silicon Ireland, 7.30pm 4 Dame Lane, Dublin.

Find out more info on http://siliconireland.blogspot.com/

I hope to post up my slides from each talk so I’ll keep in touch. See you at the events.

This post was inspired by The Evolution of Websites: How 10 Popular Websites Have (And Have Not) Changed (I’ve kept my list to British sites).

1. Play now/2004/2002

2. Sky Sports now/2004/2001

3. BBC now/2006/2002

4. .Net now/1999

5. Guardian now/2005/1999

Check out your own nostalgic websites at www.archive.org

1. Frames

We’ve come a long way from the standard frame website. As well as being poor for usability and SEO, they generally look awful too.

2. iFrames

Similar to frames, but these are small embedded frames within the page. If you need something to replicate an iFrame, e.g. a Terms & Conditions box, make use of the overflow:auto declaration in CSS.

3. Tables

If you’re a web designer and you still use HTML tables to layout a page, then you shouldn’t call yourself a web designer. Get yourself a Web Standards/CSS book. Of course using tables to display tabular data is fine.

4. Animated gifs

Really old skool websites used to fire a load of animated gifs on a page (I was one of them 10 years ago when first experimenting with web design). They usually look poor and more than one can mean there’s too much going on. They can still look well though if used tastefully (on occasion).

5. Inline formatting

If you use something like <font size=”12px”> to format the text on your web pages, you’ll have a fun time when the client asks for a slightly larger font (and you’ve got a website with over 1000 pages). Use external CSS files to format your designs and content. One amendment changes all.

6. FrontPage

I used to use FrontPage years ago and I remember it being a really poor environment to work in, that usually added a lot more code to a page than needed. I don’t know if it’s any better now, but in general it still seems to be frowned upon by web designers. Microsoft now has Expression Web, which I haven’t used, but I suspect is much better. I would say Dreamweaver is the industry standard software for web design, but I would recommend learning xHTML from scratch and hand coding.

7. Internet Explorer 6 (or even worse, 5.5)

Non-web designers don’t realise the agro that we go through when we finally get a website looking brand spanking fantastic in one browser (usually Firefox in my case) then we do the inevitable browser test in IE6 and the website is a mess. Remember to check your work in at least Firefox, Safari, IE6, IE7 and Opera. If you’re using Internet Explorer, think about using Firefox instead, or at least make sure you have the latest version of Explorer (7).

8. Pop-up windows

I hate pop-up windows. Pop-up adverts and notices are even worse. If you must insist on a pop-up/fullscreen website, at least offer an alternative link for a normal window or look at Javascript work-a-rounds.

9. New windows

I prefer to have control over how many windows and tabs I have open in my browser, I don’t like the website deciding for me. Using target=”_blank” launches a new window but disrupts the users experience, so try not to use it. I have to admit though that I still use it myself the odd time, if linking to an external website from a clients site (but I’m trying not to).

10. Flash intro pages

This one really depends on your target market and the purpose of the website. If you really want to impress the pants off someone on a one off experience (e.g., a website for a new movie) then you can get away with it. But if you’re looking repeat visits then a flash intro page will most likely turn users away, as it acts like a barrier to the main content (and also poor for SEO). If required, consider including the Flash intro into the homepage of the site, surrounded by the content and navigation, just as Adobe do.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever use any of these points,but as a general rule of thumb I think it’s safe to say you should try and stay away from most of them.

Oh, and it turned out they had used FrontPage and FrontPage extensions.

If you’ve any other tips, send them through below.

What is FOWD?

Future Of Web Design (FOWD) is a conference organised by Carsonified. It’s one of those ‘geeky’ web conferences that us web designers think are really cool and some of the biggest names in the business will be attending and speaking.

If you’re heading to it give me a shout.

Forums

1. Rails Forum - Very helpful community. Ask a question and get it answered in no time

2. Ruby Forum - Same goes for this forum. If you’re stuck a simple search should find the solution here

Books

3. Agile Web Development with Rails - Great book for beginners

Blogs/Podcasts

4. Railscasts - Clear simple podcasts from Ryan Bates

5. Ruby Inside - Regularly updated blog with a tonne of resources

6. Ruby on Rails Plugins - A lot of the functions you want to do have already been done and saved as plugins. Why re-invent the wheel?

7. Rails Envy - Interesting blog, podcasts and impressive portfolio from these guys

8. Rails 2.0 Step by Step - A few things changed with the release of Rails 2.0 in December. This will save you a lot of head banging if you’re just starting to learn RoR

Headquarters

9. Official Ruby on Rails homepage - Download and read up on this great framework

10. Rails API - Useful for looking up code

Let me know if there’s anymore that are worth looking at; I still consider myself a noob when it comes to RoR and could do with a lot more training and resources.

Hidden Secret bridal boutique and wedding studio, northern ireland

I’ve launched this project with Paddy Donnelly, a fellow Masters student. We both needed a project to experiment with the skills we’ve developed through our course and this seemed like the perfect project to do so. While Paddy has been researching viral marketing, I have been looking at web applications and usability.

The site was developed using Ruby on Rails, a programming language & framework that I have been learning and it’s great to finally get something launched after working on it night and day for the past month.

Please visit www.thebigwordproject.com and check it out. You can buy words for $1 per letter and link them to your site, facebook, bebo, myspace or flickr accounts. Keep track of our progress on The Big Word Project Blog.

I appreciate the support and any feedback you’d like to offer.

You can read the full post @ http://abulletproofidea.com/?p=66