Marshall Tufflex is a manufacturer and supplier of PVC-U, aluminium and steel products to a global market. Their new electrical cabling product, MT32, required a showcase website that would inform electrical contractors about the benefits of the new system.

I undertook the high level site structure / wireframe design, graphic design and HTML/CSS templates on this project.

It’s been long overdue, but I finally moved my web host from Memset to EZPZ Hosting.

Back in September I wrote about the Memset Miniserver not being good enough for my site, and it’s only finally now that I had the time to make the switch elsewhere.

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Waking up to Gmail this morning gave me a nice surprise — they’ve finally implemented two long over-due features: assigning labels and archiving in one function, and assigning multiple labels to posts.

The original ‘Labels’ drop down was a bit clunky:

• You could only assign one label to a message at a time. To do more than one, required you to keep going back to the drop down and selecting the next one
• You couldn’t assign a label and archive it at the same time

The new labels features have now been split into two buttons: Move To and Labels.

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So I must be one of the last to write a Happy New Year post, though at only 7 days late, maybe that’s not so bad! So… happy New Year to you one and all. I hope 2008 was a good year for you and that the coming year will be even better. And if 2008 sucked, I empathise: I had a pretty tough one too. But as Yazz and the Plastic Population once sang: The Only Way is Up, right?

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Here’s a quick snapshot of my current availability.

• I’m not taking on any more web design projects until January 2009.
• I can turn around small XHTML/CSS slice-and-dice projects until 19/12/2008. If you have a design that needs some CSS love, you should still get in touch.
• I am on holiday between 20/12/2008 and 5/1/2009. If you’re an existing client and need support during this time, I will make arrangements individually with you.

Thank you everyone for business this year. It has been very much appreciated and I look forward to creating more good stuff for you next year. :-)

Managing email can be a time consuming and soul destroying task, particularly if you receive a lot of it every day. I’ve never been great at this and have wanted to improve it for ages.

So I’ve been reading some of Merlin Mann’s articles on Inbox Zero which have helped enormously. I also watched this entertaining video of Merlin sharing his tips at a Google tech talk.

There’s a lot of information here, but the main thing I learned was the importance of quickly determining the action required for an email, and doing that action straightaway. Merlin has a five point checklist to help you: Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer, Do.

Since I’ve had them in mind, my email management has improved drastically. I now operate much more efficiently:

• Delete: I delete much more than I used to, even things that I once used to archive I’ve now learned are mostly useless and if I know I’ll never act on them, they go straight in the bin. Within “Delete” Merlin also notes that this applies to archiving too — if the email doesn’t require a response, but you might later need the information in it, then archive it immediately. The point is to get out of the inbox.
• Delegate: I don’t need to delegate anything because I work for myself, so this one’s easy!
• Respond: I respond immediately if the response is trivial. If I need more information to reply (perhaps I need to do some research), then I will…
• Defer: Flag the mail so that I can come back to it at a later date
• Do: If the action required of the email is something I can do immediately, then I do it. Simple.

These 5 things really do help — though they are only going to work if you also create and maintain a schedule for checking your email. I haven’t yet determined what’s best for me, but I’m thinking it won’t be more than three times a day: once in the morning, once at lunchtime and once late afternoon.

It also helps that I recently switched to using Gmail instead of Outlook. Gmail has a much better way of organising mail using labels rather than folders and psychologically this helps too. As I’m no longer seeing a huge list of folders, I’m less threatened by my inbox, and by using the five rules above I can pretty much get my inbox to zero everytime.

Thanks to Merlin for his tips, this has helped me a lot.

Back in July, I finished a Wordpress powered website for a film and multimedia company, Gaijin International. This was a cool project, made even better by the excellent working relationship I established with director, Geoff Court. So it really pleased me to receive the following comment on my LinkedIn profile:

I contacted Matt after having weathered a previous web-designer who just couldn’t come up with the goods. Five minutes after meeting, I knew he was the man for the job – his integrity, creativity and professionalism shone through, blasting away my past woes. The results were perfect, our new company website, www.gaijininternational.com, was everything myself and my colleague had hoped for and more. Highly recommended. We’ll be working together again in the future I hope.

Geoff Court, Gaijin International

I recently switched hosts from MediaTemple in the USA, to Memset in the UK. Initially happy with their low-end Virtual Miniserver, I’m beginning to think it’s just not up to the job.

I host two sites here, both powered by Wordpress. One has virtually no audience, but the other — this very site, Frisk Design — has reasonable activity. Since my redesign, I’ve had a fair bit of exposure and two rather large traffic spikes crashed the web server and required a reboot.

I’m not happy.

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Accordions, colour attention grabbers, fading popups, expanding lists, overly complex slideshows. What do all these have in common?

They are largely redundant.

Since everybody discovered the pretty animation effects that JavaScript libraries can produce, they have ended up in practically everything. We’ve become very accustomed to them, yet very few people seem to be questioning their use. And some of the use is worth questioning.

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LinkedIn is a social networking tool for professionals to expand their network of trusted colleagues and suppliers. Rather than the free for all approach of Facebook et al — where anyone can contact anyone — LinkedIn works on the idea that a person should invite to connect only persons that they personally know.

To prevent unsolicited invitations, the LinkedIn user agreement states that you shouldn’t be using the service to connect to people you don’t already know.

But hold on a minute here — a professional networking site that discourages networking? Isn’t that a little crazy?

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