Redswish - carefully crafted banter

A real web design curriculum

There’s constant discussion in our industry about the merits of education vs self-teaching. The general concensus seems to be from those that studied at University and further education that although it was great experience, it seldom had little impact or relevance to their roles within new media and web design.

In such a fast evolving, and still relatively new industry, standard curricula simply can’t keep up. Web designers teaching in educational institutions begin to loose touch with the latest trends and technologies, and by the time a curriculum has been created, amended and passed it’s already well out of date, and often innacurate. This leads to many students and those starting their web design education setting off in the wrong direction because ‘the breadth and depth of our medium can be daunting’.

However, WaSP (The Web Standards Project) have been working collaboratively with designers, developers and standardistas in the industry to craft a concise corriculum that delves into all the aspects of the minefield that is web design. WaSP Interact is a fantastic new community-driven initiative that provides a essential, up-to-date framework of reference materials including books, online reading, podcasts, videos and resources to stimulate and educate. To support this great selection of resources are guides as to how work should be assigned, monitored and tested in a school environment.

In their own words:

“WaSP InterAct is a living, open curriculum based upon web standards and best practices, designed to teach students the skills of the web professional. Adapt and reuse our resources. Contribute your own content and ideas.”

The breadth of the framework covers 6 core topics including Foundations, Front-End Development, Design, User Science, Server-side Development and Professional Practice. Within each of these areas it delves into sub-topics that really pad out almost every aspect, not just of basic web design, but every facet of what’s required to work in this fast-paced, demanding industry. But what really sets is apart is how open it is. Industry experts, ‘veterans’ and anyone with an knowledge to share on the matter can contribute resources, suggest new modules and how to improve and update what’s already there. This will ensure that the curriculum remains up-to-date, fresh, accurate and versatile.

This is a dynamic, real-time curriculum. This is exactly what our industry needs. This is important.

The potential of Interact is not just important to those in education, but to anyone working in web design and development. The resource database will only grow, will only get better. There is something here for everyone. So I strongly suggest you check it out.

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Dug up

A few of my posts from the Flame blog archives from last year. Possibly worth a gander:

Books or online tutorials

A discussion on the benefits of books or online learning, the clue’s in the title!

There has been mild debate in the office recently over whether we prefer online tutorials or the traditional printed word. This has been sparked by a recent subscription to Lynda.com, an online resource of video tutorials.

It seems that Lynda hasn’t been used as much as hoped or expected. But alas, this is not because we’re all too lazy to learn, on the contrary we’ve all been too busy to participate in 8 hour tutorials on designing fonts, modeling gorillas in 3DS Max or building a spaceship using only PHP and a dashing of AJAX (yeh I have no idea how you’d do that either)…

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Does anybody care what you have to say?

A muse about the value of blogging today and just how important is your voice?

Blogging has evolved, transformed and broadened massively over the years. I wouldn’t like to say ’since it was invented’ because, well it was never ‘invented’, it has just ‘become’, biologically… like a living entity. Anyway, enough semantics.

The origins of blogging have long since been lost in the mists of time, it is maintained that only scholars know the true reasoning behind the now extremely popular web activity and in some cases – business. I personally have only been blogging since January this year, and am constantly learning new tricks, styles and trends…

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Navigating large blogs

Some advice for designers on how to make large blogs more usable and easy-to-navigate.

With the exception of news-exclusive blogs, pretty much the entirety of blogs on the net feature topical or thematic content that can be useful and informative not only at the time it’s written, but for many months or even years down the line.

So when a blog grows and expands, it’s easy for older posts to get lost and unseen. Sure they’re still there, archived or categorized, but once your post count starts to rise above the lofty heights of 100 posts… chances are your old work, regardless of how well-written or useful, is going to attract less traffic from either external or internal sources.

The importance of internal blog navigation cannot be underestimated. It may seem obvious but a lack of categorization, clear navigation and tidy layout can have massive negative implications on a site’s usability, and therefore readership.

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The little things that matter

Considering how essential to the overall design even the smallest elements are, and how they should never be overlooked.

Sometimes it seems all too easy to simply throw up a contact form or a standard menu layout because at the end of the day – everyone knows how these things work, as long as they do their job, they don’t require much attention.

Oh how wrong that is. A recent string of articles from Smashing Magazine regarding Web Form Design Patterns emphasises the importance of the smallest design aspects, such as the placement of labels next to input boxes, wording, use of colour, shape, size and position and much more.

Read more…

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Wordpress Magazine Themes

This selection of 10 fantastic free Wordpress Magazine themes was compiled by Tom Walker, a self confessed gadget addict who writes for Manchester-based ink cartridge supplier, Cartridge SAVE.

10 Awesome Free Wordpress Magazine Themes

Wordpress has risen to become the online publishing tool of choice that enables anyone to create a blog or multi-page content website with relative ease. Fully customisable, this open source platform is now powering some huge online properties, including many online magazines. Of course, there are thousands of free-to-use Wordpress themes which you can use to create your own magazine with minimal programming knowledge. Here are 10 of the best free Wordpress magazine themes to try out.

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Speaking at Manchester Wordpress User Group

My first real speaking engagement, how exciting!

Next Thursday I’ll be talking about Wordpress Custom Fields (in light of the popularity of this article) at the MDDA offices in Manchester. The evening solely focuses on Wordpress (because it’s so darn cool) and will also feature a talk from Simon Wheatley on the structure of Wordpress plugins.

For more information about the group you can join the MWUG Google Group or give me or Alan Holding a shout on Twitter.

If you wish to come along it’s at the MDDA offices on Portland Street, starting at 6.20-6.30ish. Be there or be square!

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Buying and Selling Blogs

Initially, the concept of ’selling’ or spending large quantities of money on a virtual database-powered 2D on-screen entity may seem absurd. But let’s face it – blogs make money, therefore they have value and in turn become a commodity that can be sold or used to make more money!

Although the blog marketplace may seem like a far off notion to most bloggers, there is a surprising amount of currency to be made by building up high profile, high traffic blogs and trading them off for a tasty sum. Take this story from Problogger for example. And there are similar stories of bloggers selling off their hard work for up to millions of dollars.

Before you get carried away, creating a worthy blog that draws in mass traffic becomes a full-time occupation and can even require several writers. It takes time and hard work, but the pay-off can be huge. Here I’ll discuss some of the pros and cons of buying and selling blogs, whilst examining the market in more detail.

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Improving yourself as a designer

I’m never happy with my current skill level, I never quite feel like I’ve reached a particular stage that I’m aiming for. Maybe it’s just me; maybe I’ll never quite be happy with myself. Maybe that’s a good thing… maybe not.

But one things for sure – I’m constantly improving and bettering myself as a designer and much more, which is a good feeling. To be able to look back over the past 6 months and observe what new skills I’ve learnt, bad habits I’ve dropped, speed, accuracy and imagination I’ve gained and generally concede that I have improved in more ways than one is pleasing.

So, I’d like to offer some tips and ideas that may help others help themselves more, hopefully provide some inspiration and educate. And I’d sure like to hear what you think, if you’ve got anything to add please comment.

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The power of Wordpress Custom Fields

I can’t believe I’ve been playing with Wordpress for so long and never explored the Custom Fields feature. A website I’ve been working recently has required me to push the boundaries of Wordpress, or more appropriately my understanding and knowledge of it. In doing so I’ve bravely slipped deeper into the Advanced Options and lived to tell the tale – the tale of the Custom Fields…

The fundamental functionality of Custom Fields provides you with the ability to expand your posts and their content. They allow you to include extra information and features in your posts that the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t provide itself.

How it works.

When in your Write/Manage posts page, mooch down past Tags and Categories to the Advanced Options – ooh! Down here in these murky depths you’ll encounter the Custom Fields box. In here you’ll see 2 empty textareas labelled key and value.

The key is the name for your custom variable, and the value is, well, it’s value! When you create a custom field, you are creating new meta-data. You then insert a simple line of php into your Wordpress template where you want this extra data to appear in the theme and voila! You’re done.

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Increasing and maintaining blog traffic

Content is King

Without a doubt the most essential method of both bringing in and retaining high levels of traffic is through constant generation of high quality, unique content. Regardless of whatever search techniques are used to generate visitors to your site, if they’re not greeted by useful information and interesting articles they will leave and most probably not return.

It’s all too easy to take a step back and go to another site in a few mouse clicks, so it’s essential that you provide a service or a level of quality that keeps visitors at your site, and ensures their return. Blogs are one of the most dedicated methods of bringing in traffic, but the real aim is to retain visitors, obtain repeat custom, subscribers, recommendations, inbound links and build up a community where your site’s visitors are engaged and compelled to provide their own input.

Blog posts are unlike other forms of written literature. Web users scan pages, so it’s important that the useful points are easy to find. Keep paragraphs short, use bullet points and lists, blockquotes, close-captioning and other visual techniques to keep your copy interesting. Large blocks of boring copy will not get read.

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Different Blog Post Styles

It’s come to my attention just how many styles of blog posts there are. I normally categorise general blog articles into 3 or 4 obvious themes – Tutorials, Reviews, Rants and Lists. But if I think about it, there are far more different types of posts – most of which can actually be categorised within the aforementioned styles.

Please let me stress that this categorisation is my personal perception and creation, and surely other bloggers will see this from an entirely different angle – please feel free to comment on how you would approach this yourselves.

After some research and a few pages of scrawled notes and diagrams, I’ve broken my obvious categories into about 17 sub categories or more accurate styles, which fall under 4 main themes:

• Instructional
• Reviews / Editorial
• Opinion
• References

I’ve then arranged these different post types into a rather messy diagram:

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What to do when you get Bloggers Cramp

image courtesy of fountainphoto.com

Every blogger gets it, indeed every writer gets it at some point. Writers/Bloggers cramp. (Can I coin the term ‘bloggers cramp’?)

I get it all the time. In fact it’s often the reason when Redswish hasn’t been updated for a week. Sometimes ideas run dry. For mainstream blogs that attract a lot of visitors, and especially blogs designed as a source of income – this can be crippling. So, there’s 2 main ways to avoid, or solve it.

1. Make the most of the times when the creative juice flows. Build a catalogue of drafts ready to be unleashed whenever you’re away, busy or just can’t think of anything to write about.

2. Get some god darn inspiration. Thanks to a handful of articles and tutorials out there on the net, there are plenty of methods of conjouring up ideas and copy. The most prominent article to have struck me recently is Darren Rowse’s post 24 things to do when stuck for a topic to blog about. Quite a handful of a title I know.

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