Digitally Refreshing

This will be my 10th year working on the web. I was first employed by The House of Synergy in 1998 as a web designer. Since then I’ve worked for agencies and corporates in South Africa and England. I’m now working for PruHealth as a senior web designer.

I started on Photoshop 4, running on a Silicon Graphics machine, where there were no dynamic filters, no transform previews and if you wanted to edit text you had to delete the layer and retype!

I learnt and wrote HTML in note pad and tried to understand the intricacies of JavaScript, being the only tool I had access to which could bring a webpage to life. Other than an animated gif of course!

I’ve learnt a great deal in that time, not only about web design but also about what people (agencies, end users and management) expect and want from the web.

I think the biggest realisation for me is that the average website visitor to the average website isn’t actually all that interested in what the page looks like (above and beyond being readable and understandable), they are more interested in the information they can gather and the speed at which they can do it.

Through many one-sided-mirror usability testing sessions I have realised that I could have spent half the time I actually needed to on the subtle design tweaks. As long as the user journey is clear and the content well written the visitor is usually happy.

I would like to add that there are still many visitors who appreciate all the effort designers put into their work. In certain industries this high standard of design and detail is absolutely required by both visitors and owners alike.

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I’ve just downloaded and installed Open Office 2.3. The main reason I did this? So that I could use it to save my documents in Google Docs.

Using an extension called OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs, much the same way that Firefox uses extensions, I am now able to create a document locally on my PC and then easily save it to my Google Docs folder.

However, when I actually tried to save my document to Google Docs I ran into an error (I’m working on Windows XP):

Problem: no object DCH for MIME type application/atom+XML

I’ll do some research now and see what I can find out. Will keep you posted.

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Find the closest Virgin Active, LA Fitness or Cannons gym to your home, place of work or any UK postal code.

Find your closest gym now.

whypayforthegym.com is actually a website designed to show you how cheap you can get gym membership, based on how often you go to the gym, provided you take out a PruHealth health insurance policy of course. Read more about that in this handy article from Money Saving Expert.

whypayforthegym.com uses Google Maps to allow you to search for your closest gym, displaying the typical map interface we’ve all come to love – complete with address and contact details for each gym. You can even select distance in miles from the given postal code and which gyms to display – very handy indeed.

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Love photography but you don’t have a studio to hand?

Well, join the club – I spent all my hard saved cash on a Canon 5D and now I have to learn how to do things the ‘financially efficient’ way.

Step one
Find a beautiful model. Luckily for me any one of my sisters can fill this role and in this case Stacie Bowden helped me out. Ask her to apply the required make-up, hair apparatus and chose the appropriate clothing. In my case, Stacie was wearing a strapless top to expose her shoulders, very light make-up and her hair was left down.

Obviously the choice is your here, you don’t have to follow my lead. I was after a particularly natural shot with nothing detracting from Stacie’s smile, eyes and hair.

Step Two
Seek out a suitable background. Again, I wanted simplicity so a flat, painted, bedroom wall was perfect. I was also happy with the colour and the lighting conditions were good – but not perfect.

Step Three
Yep, make those lighting conditions perfect. The room I was shooting in had a large bright window to the right hand side of Stacie’s face. I needed to balance that light. I used a large reflector propped up against the wall to the left hand side of Stacie, reflecting light back into the left hand side of her face. With the use of my flash, pointing towards the reflector, I was able to lift the typical shadows out from beneath her eyes. This also had the added bonus of adding a little reflection to her eyes, just to bring the photo to life.

Step Four
The rest is up to you. Shutter, Aperture and ISO are your tools to bring a little magic to the photo. I used ISO320, in retrospect a little too high and an aperture of F8, keeping most of her face in focus. You should also be aware of what you’re doing with your lens. Too much wide angle and you will distort that image – I kept my lens at around 100mm, this also allows you to move away from the model, giving him/her space to breath and act naturally.

Oh one more thing, the reason Stacie was laughing so much in some of the photos was because she was holding a table top fan and trying to keep it steady enough to blow her hair away form her face! Always remember to have fun, and a big thanks to Stacie Bowden

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I’ve been a member of Facebook for about 5 days and I can’t get enough. I barely know half the people I talk to and I’m obsessed with who they are talking to when they not talking tome… It’s like eavesdropping online and it’s OK. I can’t help poring over the profiles of the friend’s of my friends.

it’s ridiculous. It’s like being involved in one massive relationship. I haven’t felt like this since Six Degrees back in 1998 / 99.

Here’s my Facebook profile, come join in the fun.

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I joined both networks within a few weeks of each other and proceeded to set up my profiles (Facebook and MySpace), add photos and make contact with ‘my friends’. The following commentary discusses the first few days on each network – rather than an extended experience of either – I’m just talking about first impressions now. I’ll be back with a ‘longevity’ review after a couple of months.

I started with MySpace simply because of the Google association. Google have rarely disappointed me in the past – so I expected MySapce to live up to myExpectations (ha ha). Sadly I was mistaken, clearly Google have nothing to do with MySpace other than advertising to its members and providing a handy search interface.

After entering all the relevant details I was presented with my home page – and let’s face it, it looks bad. Layout is shocking and it’s just as well you can customise your MySpace homepage yourself – because it’ll need a good working over.

In order to add my friends I had to go off and search for them, how tedious, where’s the import contacts facility which Facebook provide so elegantly? All I had to do was provide Facebook with my email login details (Gmail in this case) and it would go off and find existing Facebook members from my address book – I didn’t know I knew so many people already involved in the social networking phenomenon. From here it was just a case of selecting who I wanted to become friends with and Facebook took care of the rest, sending invites et all.

Adding my personal information into Facebook went smoothly enough, already impressed by the contacts import system I was eager to see what else Facebook could help me with. I uploaded a couple of photos which contained Facebook members and to my surprise was able to highlight these people in the photograph and link to their Facebook accounts! Visual networking like I’ve never seen it, it’s not just about words any more!

It seems that I can’t edit the look and feel of my Facebook home page – good or bad? I think it’s good – the interface is clean and easy to use and that means everyone else’s home page will also be easy to use.

Sadly MySpace is already falling by the wayside, I’m off to edit my Facebook account.

Now I need to join Google Groups to round off my social networking experience.

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Every time I see that information-revolution advert on television I’m think “I really must write that piece about Irrepressible.info, an Amnesty International campaign”.

So here you have it…

So much money is spent on taking market share (not just by search engines) and not enough on empowering people to actually see and interact with the Web in the first place:

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

Censoring web access if rife throughout our world, the acronym WWW hardy rings true in today, perhaps we should use Most of the World Wide Web instead (MWWW).

Read more about which countries’ governments are restricting Internet access or check out this handy Internet censorship map from OpenNet - complete with mouseovers for more information, it’s quote detailed and very interesting.

So, back to Irrepressible.info, if you don’t agree with what’s going on, visit Irrepressible.info and sign their petition.

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It wasn’t until today that I noticed the small red word which reads ‘new!‘ on Google Maps…

Now you can plot points onto a Google map, save it and share with your friends online. I like the Chelsea Walk, created by Paul Thompson.

If you’d rather just sit back and relax, take a tour of Our Earth as Art, created by Jonathan Perkins. It’s amazing.

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I spend a lot of time using Gmail. I often work remotely so it’s a lifesaver - something that I simply couldn’t do without. A fixed email application on my laptop just wouldn’t do (I need to get to my mail from anywhere) and I find other online email systems clunky and hard to use.

Anyway, that’s enough praising Gmail because I’ve always been slowed down and frustrated by the lack of ‘drag and drop‘ when it comes to attaching documents to an email. Having to rely on attaching a file via a typical dialogue box can slow you down considerably especially when you’re working on several projects at once and have files all over the place.

That was until I found a drag and drop plug in for Firefox which allows you to actually drag and drop multiple files from explorer into Gmail!

Download the Firefox drag and drop extension.

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Backing up photos leads to a lot of reminiscing. I found this image amongst a batch of photos I took whilst driving to work in South Africa. I would stop and take a photo every kilometre so that friends and family could see what I experienced every morning and evening.

The drive started in Northwold and finished in Sandton.

Part two will consist of a UK version. There will be no driving - just walking, bus and tube.

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