Geeking out in Paris.
“The beauty of responsive web design becomes obvious when you see your site in smart phones, tablets, and widescreen desktop browsers. It’s as if your site was redesigned to perfectly fit that specific environment. And yet there is but one actual design—a somewhat plastic design, if you will. An extensible design, if you prefer. It’s what some of us were going for with “liquid” web design back in the 1990s, only it doesn’t suck.” —
Responsive design is the new black – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
Some lovely stuff here, and perhaps the way Web design should be. Unfortunately there’s a small voice nagging at me that because this approach relies on ‘craft’ as opposed to ‘product’ or ‘marketing’, it will ultimately go the way of liquid web design or ‘mobile style sheets’ (remember them?).
Got my life back.
“Tindal Street is to join Atlantic Books in the Independent Alliance – a collective of independent publishers headed by Faber and Faber.” — Tindal Street Press forges new partnership with leading independent publisher | Tindal St Press
Came back with renewed enthusiasm and drive after seven sun-drenched days in Dubrovnik. 273 emails later, feeling knackered & despondent…
Standing virgin train back to Brum. Attendant: ‘it’s’s because it’s the first off-peak train’. Me: ‘so entirely predictable then’ +2 coaches
Two #goodmeetings today. That’s at least one more than I was expecting.
“But the weirdest stuff is in section 12.1 on “Design”. The “design” of the website seems to have been viewed as something separate from its platform and functionality. Having “upgraded” the backend, people are surprised that the front end has stayed essentially similar. The report recommends hiring a designer to improve the front-end templates. Such an anti-holistic approach cannot fail but to produce poor results. It’s like saying you’re going to design the shell of a car separate from its engineering, performance, cost and most importantly, customer expectations and requirements.” — Weird, but entirely typical of websites that are procured via IT requirements documents. You wouldn’t believe how common this misconception is amongst people who procure websites and content management systems. From a comment on The report on birmingham.gov.uk is published | Podnosh
“After speaking to more than 60 local authority officials, the authors of the report were forced to admit: “We remain unclear who is actually in overall charge of the web within Birmingham City Council.” — Birmingham Post - News - West Midlands News - ‘Not good enough’, concludes report into Birmingham City Council website
“English National Opera’s website has crashed due to the high volume of people trying to book tickets for The Duchess of Malfi, which went on sale this morning.” — The Stage / News / Punchdrunk’s Malfi crashes ENO website Another Opera website bites the dust due to high booking demand. Should’ve gone to Made Media.
Google Maps API Styled Map Wizard
Having fun scrutinising some travel sites. So much easier to be a smartarse when your team’s not responsible for corralling the architecture
“Yes, I know you’re a master of the web, that you’ve visited every website written in English, that you’ve been going to SXSW for ten years, that you were one of the first bloggers, you used Foursquare before it was cool and you can code in HTML in your sleep. Yes, I know that you sit in the back of the room tweeting clever ripostes when speakers are up front failing on a panel and that you had a LOLcat published before they stopped being funny. But what have you shipped?” — Seth’s Blog: But what have you shipped?