A travel site organising trips to unusual destinations: built in Wordpress and using Slideshow Pro for photo presentation.

I was looking at The Wayback Machine recently — a fantastic resource that has been archiving websites for more than ten years. I was trying to find an old site I built that I never kept a copy of, but alas it was not there.

I was disappointed but began to think about the first site I built — it was in 1997 and was version two of Maxim Training’s website, the company I was working for at the time. I punched in the URL and lo and behold, there it was in all it’s framed glory:

http://web.archive.org/…/www.maxim.co.uk/

Looking at this with hindsight, my reaction was “What was I thinking?” I then went and gave myself a good slap.

Look at that lovely textured background! Look at the frames (two levels no less!). It has keyword spamming, a table based design, graphical text, crappy icons (I was sure they looked a lot better than that when I drew them) and a whole host of other things that are now firmly at the top of the list entitled “Big Fat No-Nos of Web Design”.

So what’s the point of highlighting this, other than some self-indulgent, self-berating nostalgia? Well, I think it shows that – despite the web still being an immature medium – we have come such a long way in such a short space of time.

Most of the things that are bad about that site are no longer being perpetuated by good web designers and developers. We’ve learnt so much:

• Sites that use frames stop search engines from indexing your content
• Graphical text is not search engine friendly and is inaccessible to some browsing devices
• Table-based layouts break usability and accessibility
• Keyword-spamming can get you de-listed from search engines
• People associate good design with good content — if your design sucks, no-one will read your content, however useful it might be. I think I’ve got a bit better at design since then!

Of course, we’re still learning. The web is maturing at a staggering rate. It’s becoming easier and quicker to develop new ideas, new ways of interacting with customers and new marketing opportunities. It’s exciting and it is hopefully only going to get better.

I’m looking forward to the day I can write an article about this site and say “What on earth was I thinking?” Well, almost.

I’ve just purchased a new keyboard and mouse, the cheapest part of an overdue upgrade for my aging desktop PC. I opted for a wireless combination from Microsoft, the Wireless Optical Desktop 1000. After using them for a day, I regret my decision and I hope PC World will take them back and give me a refund.

Read more…

I recently used Ticketweb to buy tickets to see Editors at the Brixton Academy in October. Reaching the last part of the ugly online ordering form, the user is presented with this. Spot the deliberate mistake:

The last part of the form asks you to select a privacy option. The method used is flawed yet it’s very common:

You’re being asked a binary choice question, where the answer is either yes or no. These types of questions should use a checkbox, not the two radio buttons that are presented here. Radio buttons are mutually exclusive and should only be used when selecting something from a list of options. And when using radio buttons, you need to ensure that one option is pre-selected using the attribute checked="checked", which has been omitted here.

It constantly amazes me that basic mistakes like this are still being made in modern web development. It’s probably just ignorance on the part of the developer and is easily solved through education. I was going to email them about it but can’t find anywhere on their site to do so…

It was great to receive the following endorsement from Malcolm at Electric Putty, for my first job as a freelancer:

Thanks for the great work you did on the Karuna website. The client is thrilled with the site and your HTML is a big part of that… Solid HTML is the foundation of all great websites and you really understand the medium.

Malcolm Elsworth, Electric Putty

Over the weekend I tried to become a member of the British Film Institute by applying online.

It was pretty painless to complete the online form until I got to the payment screen. I entered my Maestro card details and clicked ‘Submit’ but the form failed. I was told to check that I had entered the Card Issue Number correctly. There was nothing wrong with it, so I tried the process again in Internet Explorer 7 in case there was some specific bug happening in FireFox, my regular browser. The same thing happened in IE7.

Frustrated, I spotted the note at the bottom of the page saying to call their Membership Helpline any time up until 10pm. This was on Sunday afternoon, so I rang and unsurprisingly was put through to voicemail that stated opening hours were “Ten until six, Monday to Friday”.

Today, I received a call back stating that they were having problems with Switch/Maestro cards on the site and that I should complete the membership over the phone. I was impressed to receive a reply: often you never hear back when leaving voicemails on customer service lines.

So I called the box office who said that they might not be able to complete the membership as all their credit/debit card machines were having problems! Some luck. In the event, they took my details and my card did in fact go through so in a few days I will receive my membership and lots of free gubbins.

Three things stand out here:

1. The web is great unless it goes wrong over the weekend
2. Ensure your customer contact information is correct
3. A disgruntled customer can be retained and delighted with a courteous personal call

I’m a new fan of the BFI. What a shame then that I can’t get tickets for Withnail 20 years on, one of the reasons i joined.

If you’ve played Tomb Raider Anniversary on the PC, you’ll know how frustrating it is to control, with Lara Croft variously performing as an hyperactive chipmunk on speed and an asthmatic three legged rhino with some heavy shopping.

This very funny video review sums it all up perfectly.

I recently went from zero blogs to two, more or less overnight. It appears I may have not thought things through clearly.

I currently have this blog and another at palemovie. The intention was to use palemovie as my personal blog and friskdesign as technology centric. Upon consideration this seems overkill (and it’s also a lot of work keeping both maintained). So I’ve decided to only use friskdesign and have migrated previous posts over from palemovie. If you’ve bookmarked palemovie, ditch it and use friskdesign instead.

Page design and front-end coding for a heavily form based business portal — a complex build with over 20 unique templates.

Welcome to my new portfolio website.

Since I decided to recently leave a new full time job and return to freelance web design, I’ve been so busy with work that it’s been difficult to get this new portfolio online!

However, after several weeks of evening work designing, tinkering and experimenting, I finally got there and tonight I uploaded everything. For the first time I have also started a blog — in fact I’ve started two! The blog on this site will cater for web and technology related discussions; more personal musings about goings-on in my private life can be viewed over at palemovie.

For now, it remains for me to say thankyou to those people who stuck by me in my recent turmoil. I feel very happy with my decision and I look forward to developing some great work for excellent clients.