Category Archives: Web Culture

What is the purpose of your site?


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Here’s one of those ‘less talk, more listen’ posts. You don’t get many from me! I want to know a bit about your websites and your approach and attitude towards their purpose. Is your site(s) designed to make money, inform and educate, publicise a product/service/person or is the purpose unclear – perhaps it’s just for fun. For each case, how do you achieve your goals?

Design and Usability

How does your site design contribute to the end goal? With regards to user experience, what do you feel takes priority – enabling visitors to get to where they need to be as quickly as possible, or to provide an enjoyable experience. Or both? And how do you go about achieving this?

How much do you feel design contributes towards the overall user experience? Would you prefer a site that is easy to navigate and view, with well written copy and clear structure but features a minimal or unattractive design? Or would you rather a beautiful looking site with fancy dynamic functionality and gimmicks, but ‘makes you think’ a more? What about a balance of the two. How do you feel you can work to create a website that is fantastically well structured and presented, whilst revealing some tasty eye-candy?

Measuring success

How do you measure your site’s success? What do you determine to be ‘success‘? Site traffic? Perhaps a deeper look at your site’s analytis; what do you feel takes precedence? Length of visit, repeat visits, countires visited from, pure volume of traffic? How do these statistics vary depending on your site’s purpose? Perhaps you feel the best measure of your site’s success is more organic than statistical – the comments you receive, RSS or email subscribers, contact form feedback or a combination of the lot.

What do you feel is more important; your visitors experience or the site stats and revenue made?

I want your opinions

Please take the time out to comment below. This post isn’t about me or Redswish, I want to know what other people think. Get your site URL in there to get some coverage. I’ll be summing up everyone’s responses in an article in a few weeks.

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Managing Brand Consistency


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There’s no debating the fact that an online presence is essential in today’s market. Indeed there are only a few niche industries that do not rely upon or are affected by the global transition from workplace to web.

When it comes to doing it right, anyone with an ounce of knowledge of the way the Internet works will agree that representing your business or product online is by no means as simple as throwing up a website and claiming your territory in a small corner of the web.

Aside from the many factors that make a ‘great’ website, such as careful usability consideration, good aesthetic design and well-written copy; there are the numerous other external variables including SEO, PR and email marketing etc that help to promote your website, and in turn your brand.

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Location Independent Living (and working)


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While on my little trip at the moment I met a Scottish couple and, aided by a few German beers, we got to know each other a bit. Amongst the hours of gradually blurrier conversation we talked about what I do for a living and the ability my line of work affords me to actually work anywhere in the world.

By this I mean that I could be in a small Thai village or on a Caribbean island but, providing I have an Internet connection, could still technically do my job. This may sound simple and in some aspects it is, but it can still be a scary step to take when you’re settled in a cushty regular job or of course if your line of work requires you to be within a certain location.

This lifestyle is indeed job-specific, and lends itself very much so to online entrepreneurs and designers, SEOs etc. I’ve never met my previous 3 freelance clients, but to be honest I don’t need to. We’ve spoken over the phone and via email and the work has been completed successfully and if anything at less expense.

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Accessible web design – The Whats and Whys


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AccessibilityWhat is this ‘accessibility’?

Aside from becoming a buzzword that designers love to throw around (“I’m a standards-aware, accessible web designer… therefore am superior to you.”), accessibility is about ensuring your site can be accessed and used well by all types of web users, including disabled or somehow impaired users.

This may not seem like a big deal to all the comfortable ‘typical’ web users reading this article right now. But you can be assured that a hefty portion of surfers on the net may be blind or visually impaired, motor impaired, paralysed or perhaps just using a particular web browser or operating system that doesn’t render websites like you would expect, or wish.

In fact, the net is the alternative that a lot of disabled users would rather turn to then trawling out to the shops to spend money, or to the library to learn. If you were in a wheelchair, would you prefer to make the arduous trip into town or roll over to your computer with a mug of coffee and The Beautiful South playing in your warm, cosy home?

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Google set to launch browser called Chrome


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Well it was bound to happen at some point, but this was quite unexpected. A comic accidentally released yesterday tells the story of Chrome’s development and Google’s approach to creating the new Internet browser. It’s not a bad read really.

The Chrome beta is proposed to launch today, although I’m struggling to find it anywhere. Google have kept things pretty hush hush on this project, although have formally announced the launch of Chrome on their official blog.

Chrome is designed to be clean, well-tailored towards the user experience, fast and get this – it’s open source! The new browser, if successful, will help to aid Google’s development of online apps and technologies, as well providing a fresh perspective on how we use the internet.

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I'm a web 2.0 guy in a web 2.0 world!


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Sheep - I'm sorry!Being a cool kinda guy, I was sat at home last night and decided to listen back to some of the recordings from last year’s Future of Web Design conference in New York. I know you’re jealous.

Elliot Jay Stocks, a designer I respect (possibly more due to his hair than his skills…) decided to rant about web 2.0 design. How could he commit such a heinous act? Well someone has to, and it may as well come from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

His ‘beef’ was not regarding the web 2.0 culture and technologies, but the design mindset; that accompanying this explosion of social web interaction and development is a sidelining assumption that to be ‘web 2.0′ you have to show off a glossy navigation bar, reflected logos, banners and badges, beveled edges etc. You all know what I’m talking about. And many of us are guilty – myself included.

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The ALA Survey 2008


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ALA Survey 2008 I took it! The 2008 A List Apart survey. Jeffrey’s been ranting on about it on Twitter and his blog so as I generally get some benefit out of the result of these things – it seemed only fair to take part.

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Is Cuil all that cool?


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CuilCuil is a new search engine service set to rival Google, ironically created by a group of previous Google employees. The search service, pronounced ‘cool’, claims to index over 120 billion pages (which if I may say so myself, is a staggering amount). Various sources reckon this is almost 3 times as much as Google, however Google state otherwise, although not revealing any actual statistics.

Cuil approaches search slightly differently from Google. Firstly, search results are displayed in a magazine format as opposed to a list. But their real USP is that they don’t collect user data as Google does. This could be a point that sways many people, especially in light of the recent focus on the amount and methods Google use to gather data on it’s users.

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