Pitching for business

We had Jenni Allen in from The Reading Room to talk about pitching to clients prior to final year students pitching for business as their last assignment, grouped as fictitious web design companies. It just happens that .Net has published an article on the same this month: http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/latest-issue/issue-187.

Andy Clarke

Early this year I was lucky enough to spend the day at an Andy Clarke  (http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/) seminar – see http://forabeautifulweb.com/classes. Andy told us about some great colour and typography sites:

These two are wonderful starting places for discovering a colour palette.

http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

http://www.colorhunter.com/

These three are typography crazy.

http://ilovetypography.com/ – a blog

http://www.webtypography.net/ – a book

http://www.typechart.com/ – a tool

Guest speaker

We had the excellent Karen Loasby (http://www.iaplay.com/) ex- BBC IA, currently RNIB IA as a guest speaker last week. Karen did a fantastic talk about the role of the IA and the last BBC re-design regarding the information architecture. Great stuff. Two bloggs Karen mentioned were:

http://blockslabpillar.com/

http://www.currybet.net/

A positive point (after the very negative one that most students of the unit, and those invited did not attend) was some third year students said it helped pull into focus what they had been studying with us over the past three years.

Write for Reuse

Those that have just attended the ‘writing for the web’ lecture may be interested in one of Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox articles:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-reuse.html

Oh and whilst you are reading, take a look at this recent A List Apart article – In Defense of Readers by Mandy Brown http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofreaders. Excellent stuff, with some interesting comments.

The Web Designer’s Idea Book, The Ultimate Guide to Themes, Trends and Styles in Website Design By Patrick McNeil

The site of the book ( http://www.designmeltdown.com/ ), looks very interesting. Recommended by Sara Robinson, the site provides a whole lot of inspiration. Perfect for all my students who are currently focused on the development of their project web sites.

What’s with Google’s new mini icon?

BBC article on the latest Google’s favicom.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7839744.stm.
Oh and while you are visiting the BBC take a look at Bill Thompson’s latest output. Very pertinent to someone my age (his age) and anyone else distracted while reading this!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7837834.stm

Funny that I remember his penultimate sentence from one of my first lectures as a Library student!
“It may not be long before the entire record of human achievement is available on demand, indexed, and catalogued according to open standards that anyone can use.” Back in 1992 we pondered on how this could ever happen.

SEO Principals

We had a guest slot from the excellent Simon Wharton from Pushon Ltd. Simon provided an excellent insight into a variety of tips and trick of the SEO industry, using a variety of excellent examples. The lecture slides can be found at: Manchester SEO company Pushon Ltd.

WCAG 2.0

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

11 December 2008 — Today W3C announces a new standard that will help Web designers and developers create sites that better meet the needs of users
with disabilities and older users. Drawing on extensive experience and community feedback, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
improve upon W3C’s groundbreaking initial standard for accessible Web
content.

http://www.w3.org/2008/12/wcag20-pressrelease.html

Twitaway – Free CSS book

http://twitaway.aws.sitepoint.com/

A fantastic bargin from Sitepoint who are offering The Art & Science of CSS (pdf) for free. The offer ends in 12 days. What are you waiting for?

My saviour!

Thanks to the excellent bBold blog (http://bbold.com/blog/) my sanity has been saved. Since ‘upgrading’ to Mac Office 2008 I have been driven to distraction by the slow loading time of the Office apps. This little tip has now drastically reduced the times and saved my soul! See http://bbold.com/blog/apple/speed-up-microsoft-office-2008-for-mac/

Whilst on the bBold blog I also picked up on the following which was new to me:
“IE7 is a JavaScript library to make Microsoft Internet
Explorer behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many HTML
and CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and
IE6.

See: http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/