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Paul: Hello and welcome to the stupidest thing I’ve ever come up with. The 200th episode live 12-hour broadcast at boagworld.com, the podcast for all those involved in designing, developing and running web sites on a daily basis. We have so many people here today I just do not know where to start, but I would obviously start with the lovely Marcus Lillington.

Marcus: Hello Paul. I don’t know what all the fuss is about because this is actually my 196th Boagworld.

Paul: Which is, by far, more important than the 200 mark! So it’s really good to be here. Hopefully everybody can hear on the live stream. If they can’t, Ryan can you please shout. We have a room full of people here, it’s all gone very over the top in our organisation of things. Hopefully everybody’s here, hopefully everybody’s enjoying it and it should be a good day.

Marcus: Talk slower Paul.

Paul: What? Just leave me alone. You’re not allowed to talk because you haven’t got a mic. People without a mic don’t get to talk, it’s the way of things, let’s be clear about that – set the rules to begin with. You’ve gotta start enthusiastically because I know by 10 o’clock…

Marcus: Enthusiastic and big gaps between the words.

Paul: I’ve got about 144 questions I wrote last night, so it’s gonna be a full-on show.

Marcus: Ask me one.

Paul: ‘Why?’

Marcus: That’s it, just ‘Why?’

Paul: There we go. Also we have a few people in the room, we have Drew. Hello Drew.

Drew: Hello.

Paul: And Rachel. Hello Rachel.

Rachel: Hello.

Paul: It’s good to have you two on the show starting off bright and early.

Drew: It’s great to be here! I’m not sure about ‘bright and early’.

Paul: What time did you leave?

Drew: We left about 8 o’clock, so it wasn’t too bad.

Paul: Oh that’s not too bad, that could’ve been worse. We’ve also got Paul Stanton in the room. He has to shout very loudly as he doesn’t have a mic. It looks like he’s sorting out Twitter and everybody on Twitter. He seems to be spending time on Twitter

Marcus: He wasn’t, he was just playing around.

Paul: He was not! A minute ago he was talking to people on Twitter and answering their questions. So what are you, @stanton aren’t you. So people can send messages to him. We are gonna swap around a lot in this show because we’re not gonna be able to keep up 12 hours, me and Marcus sitting at the mic. So I expect Stanton and Ryan Taylor as well who’s here will be taking a turn, as will Dave and Craig who are sitting right down at the far end of the table.

Marcus: Have they got cameras pointing at them all the way down there?

Paul: No they haven’t, let’s turn it round – hang on. I can probably change camera to get them in it if I can work this out; It’s all very hi-tech.

Marcus: Wave to the camera!

Paul: There we go, see their now on the camera. Suffice it to say you are now on camera. Ryan isn’t however coz my laptop is breaking his head.

Ryan: It’s alright, no one wants to see me.

Paul: No I think we can all survive without that view. So there we go.

Marcus: I just wanted to do an apology before anything goes wrong. We can’t believe we’ve actually managed to make all this work. We’ve got a big telly that people who are gonna do Skype interviews with us are gonna appear upon. We can record them etc etc. So at the moment it’s all working, but who knows whether it will carry on?

Paul: It won’t! What particularly amuses me about this is that I’m so confident that something will go wrong that I’ve produced this screen: “We have technical difficulties. Be right back” is what it says. That’s how confident I am that something will go wrong at some stage today, but hopefully not too much. So we’ve got loads of guests.

Marcus: Give us a run-down Paul.

Paul: We’ve got Drew and Rachel from edgeofmyseat.com here to start off with. We’ve got Elliott on later around 11.30. We’ve got our own Rob Borley on talking about productivity and project management at about midday. Then, Drew and Rachel, apparently you’re back later to talk about something called the Joel Test, which I’ve never heard of, so that’ll be interesting.

Drew: Excellent.

Paul: We’ve also got Simon Collison on talking about user requirements and pushing the boundaries. We’re gonna discuss alternative devices. I think we probably need to tackle the whole subject of the iPad at some stage – it would seem wrong not to. Christian Hellman’s on at 2 o’clock talking about developer evangelism. Relly Annett-Baker, who was due to be here today but she’s poorly, so won’t make it, but we’re gonna talk to her via Skype.

Marcus: That’s the worst news. She was bringing cakes.

Paul: She was bringing cakes. We do however have one cake already – let’s see if I can get a shot of the cake so that we know that there is a cake here. This is very hard, I’m trying to do so many different things at the same time.

Marcus: I’m gutted. Sorry. No I’m gonna have to go out the room for a minute.

Paul: There’s the cake, look! That’s nice cake. There’ll be more cake, it’ll be fine. So there we go, we’ll put Marcus back on camera looking miserable. So Relly is gonna be here in spirit.

Marcus: She did tweet in the middle of the night, which was basically was translated as “I’m up,” which means: “The baby’s up.”

Paul: Yeah, I think she had quite a rough night. So we’ve got Sarah Parmenter at 3 o’clock, talking about being a freelancer. We’ve got Andy Clarke at 3.30 talking about designing in the browser. Yaili’s coming along at 4 o’clock, she’s actually coming here isn’t she? So she’s gonna be here from 3, but will be joining us at 4 to talk about CSS3. We’ve got Chris Mills at 4.30 talking about education. And then we’re gonna talk a little bit about getting yourself noticed and we’re gonna have loads of time as well for listener questions and site reviews. At 6 o’clock we’ve got Patrick O’Keith talking about community – or this is long isn’t it, there’s a lot of this. Flip me this is a bad idea.

Marcus: Well we’ve done 5 minutes, Paul. So we’re ok.

Paul: Is that all we’ve done? Oh my goodness. This is such a bad idea, what the hell was I thinking? So that’s exciting. We’ve got Alex Hunter from Virgin.

Marcus: Let’s start again. Welcome to the 200th Boagworld and the 8-hour podcast.

Paul: And then I’ve got bored. There’s other stuff after that. There will be loads going on. Somebody’s asking in the chat room what time Ryan Carson is on. He’s not actually on this show. They don’t work Friday’s as Ryan has just told us, so unfortunately we’re gonna miss out on their wonderful contributions. They wouldn’t consider this work! This isn’t work, this is just playing.

Marcus: No it isn’t.

Paul: Ok. So the whole thing I guess is gonna be very relaxed. What are you doing, Marcus?

Marcus: People are saying “I just saw me on Boagworld.”

Paul: What, one of this lot down the room?

Marcus: No. On the telly.

Paul: Oh on the big telly? Oh I see, they can watch themselves. That’s exciting. So it’s gonna be fairly laid back to be honest, there’s no way we can keep up a normal podcast pace on a show like this, but hopefully you can spend the day hanging out with us having some good time. If you wanna tweet about the show, please use the hashtag #bw200 and also obviously share this show around so we get as many people as possible watching it. Marcus is gonna record the whole thing, aren’t you Marcus?

Marcus: Yep. I might have lied then. It’s currently recording. How long that lasts for I don’t know – I’ve only got about 20 gigs left on my hard drive.

Paul: 20 gigs is gonna be ample!

Marcus: 12 hours of audio? Ummm, not sure.

Paul: Yeah! Can’t be that much. You can get a high definition film for about a gig, and that’s like an hour, and that’s hi-def. Video!

Marcus: Yeah, alright, whatever.

Paul: “Whatever”? It’s gonna be like that is it? Everybody wants it to be recorded in its entirety, Marcus. Everybody wants it.

Marcus: I’m recording it. I’m recording it!

Paul: That’s good. As long as we understand at the outset.

Marcus: I don’t know how long I’m gonna record it for, but I am recording it.

Paul: We’re also recording it to Ustream. I wanna know at what point Ustream gives up.

Marcus: You did hit record didn’t you? I was supposed to remind you of that.

Paul: Yeah, thanks.

Ryan: Apparently we are having quite a few people having trouble with the stream at the moment.

Paul: Well that’s their problem. Then hard-chesse, sucker. I don’t know what we can do about that. Is there anything we can do about that?

Ryan: Apparently it’s better on the Boagworld site than the Ustream site.

Paul: Ah, there’s a useful tip. So check out the Boagworld site. You can either go to boagworld.com/live or just go to the homepage and you’ll find a blog post which includes the video in and you’ll also get there a rough agenda of what we’re doing for the day – and I do mean rough.

Marcus: Even my wife is gonna look at this, which is just unheard of.

Paul: Really!? Well I’m thinking about getting my son on it later, via Skype. I thought that might be quite fun.

Marcus: She did say “I’m not prepared to do any talking.” And I said: “Well you’re not allowed to.”

Paul: Ooh, that’s a bit harsh.

Marcus: But I’d forgot about Skype.

Paul: Yeah, she could’ve Skype’d in.

Marcus: She hasn’t got a mic on her work computer so she couldn’t have done it anyway.

Paul: And Cath is coming in later to do us sandwiches and stuff.

Marcus: Well she can definitely come and say hi then.

Paul: Yeah, we’ll let her in shall we? I hope she doesn’t do anything embarrassing.

Marcus: What time’s Cath coming in? I’m hungry.

Paul: I think she’s gonna be around from about 11. I think that’s the plan.

Marcus: That’s great, that’s really soon.

Paul: I know, it’s soon enough. But we’re not eating at 11, that’s too early to eat. You don’t get food that early, I’m sorry Marcus. Ok, so what shall we do first?

Marcus: I’ve got a couple of cream eggs in the car. Walnut Whips!

Paul: You’re still on food. You have got an unhealthy obsession with Walnut Whips.

Marcus: It’s just that the garage that I fill up with petrol is a Marks and Spencer and obviously they decided to make a gazillion Walnut Whips and now they’re giving them away for nearly free and I used to love them when I was a kid.

Paul: They taste really plastic-y inside, I don’t like the middles.

Marcus: Yeah it’s great.

Paul: It’s like there’s nothing natural in them at all, is there, except the walnut. And even that I’m not sure about.

Marcus: The chocolate’s brown and earthy and good for.

Paul: There we go. We’ve got 12 hours of this people. You’ve brought your guitar haven’t you? And apparently the rumour is that Jeremy Keith, when he comes in – do you know, we haven’t put Jeremy down for a slot.

Ryan: We’ve got two-and-a-half hours of free slots.

Paul: No, I’ve filled them up!

Ryan: You’ve filled them up?

Paul: I’m gonna talk – for two-and-a-half hours.

Marcus: Yeah, I’ll look forward to that.

Paul: We ought to let Jeremy on the show. Let’s get him all the way down then not let him on the show, not let him say anything. He’s bringing his bazooka thing – malandarin? Something like that.

Marcus: Is he? Mandarin. Mandolin.

Paul: No it’s not a mandolin, it’s a bazooka.

Marcus: Bozouki. For God’s sake. Dealing with monkeys. That’s a big mandolin. I just thought he’d probably bring the mandolin because it’s little.

Paul: Well I don’t know what he;s bringing. Something playable.

Marcus: Whatever. How many times I’m gonna say that today?

Paul: I think there is definitely an option for some kind of buzzword bingo today. Somebody has suggested that every time somebody says ‘awesome’ they should have a drink. We ought to have drinking games.

Marcus: I’ve got to drive home!

Paul: Oh yeah that’s true. The audience can have drinking games.

Marcus: Yeah. I’d love to do that. Brought some beer, but I can only really have one or two.

Paul: Aww that’s a bit poor. You are gonna be here over 12 hours, so if you start now you’ll have sobered up by the end.

Marcus: That’s a good point actually. Wedding drinking – drink yourself sober.

Paul: Exactly. So there you go, it’ll all be fine.

Marcus: So there’s me wobbling at about 6 or 7, but come midnight I’m absolutely fine.

Drew: “I’ve drunk myself sober, officer”

Paul: Kids, we are not encouraging drink-driving. Also, kids – those in the chat room – we’re not encouraging bunking off school to listen to the 200th Boagworld either!

Marcus: Why not?

Paul: What? Social responsibility here!

Drew: It’s Friday. Nobody does any work on a Friday at school.

Marcus: School’s rubbish these days anyway. It’s just grooming for exams. I know, I’ve got kids there.

Paul: One of your kids has left school – and that worked out well.

Marcus: It might do. She’s actually going for a university interview today.

Paul: Today? And you’re not with her? You miserable arse!

Marcus: Well I would’ve liked to have been. Some idiot organised a 12-hour podcast.

Paul: I want to see the sick note from your mum that says you’ve got to go home at 7 or whatever time it was.

Marcus: That’s later than I’m normally allowed to stay out. I normally have to be in before it’s dark, which is about half 5 at the moment. But she said, if I’m good – and because it’s Friday – I can stay out till 7. So I’ll be here till about 6 or 7 and then I’ve got to go. Sorry.

Paul: Just the way it is. Ok.

Marcus: So obviously I won’t be able to record the last 3 hours.

Paul: Have we got anybody interested in coming on to try out the Skype with us, any listeners on the show?

Ryan: I’ve just messaged them, nobody’s replied yet.

Paul: Are people still having problems with the stream? Oh they’re moaning. There’s no way we can do anything other than we’re doing really can we. We’re streaming, it’s going up. I’m just having a look at the settings, see if there’s anything I can do. I can’t without stopping broadcasting.

Ryan: Someone’s complaining they can only message every minute.

Paul: I’ve turned the chat room onto slow because it just becomes so overwhelming.

Marcus: “This is like Loose Women.” Lovely. ‘Loose Geeks.’ Ustreamer33005.

Paul: Ryan, if you click on ‘Chat Options’ then you should be able to have an option to turn off Slow Mode. You just turn it on, it’s a toggle – it’s either on or off.

Marcus: “When do we learn something?” Excellent, keep those comments coming.

Paul: So we will actually start getting to the nuts and bolts of things about half 10. We can start a bit earlier if we wanted to. But I thought it might be quite fun to get some of you guys on the show before we get any further. Do you wanna actually ask any questions? We’ve got Drew and Rachel here, we’re here. If people wanna kick off with a question, we can do that as well. Oh apparently the stream is suddenly miraculously better. We’ve got someone calling in, that’s exciting because we can try out our big Skype camera. Hang on, if I now pretend to be professional by going back to me – although now I’m leaning across the camera.

Marcus: Well you did say “pretend to be professional”.

Paul: Oooh we’ve got someone coming through. It’s gonna be exciting guys. Any minute now, we’ll wait until he appears. We’re dialling him. Now should I know who Ben is?

Ben: You should know who I am!

Paul: Oh God he can hear me. Have you got video?

Ben: Yes I can hear everything.

Paul: Oh no. You got video?

Ben: No. Let me hit this button here which says ‘Video’ and maybe something will happen. That’s turning on my video.

Paul: Ooh! Great.

Marcus: It’s very sunny where you are Ben.

Paul: Where are you then, Ben?

Ben: I’m in my study in London.

Paul: It’s very nice there, it’s obviously good weather in London.

Ryan: Is that your new study?

Ben: No it’s not a new study, it’s just you didn’t see it in daylight, Ryan.

Paul: We’re not used to daylight; it scares and intimidates us. So Ben, apparently I should know you. I’ve had dinner with you? When was that? Oh now I’m sounding like a complete jerk.

Marcus: He’s just so bloody embarrassing. He did this yesterday.

Paul: Oh yeah I got a clients’ name wrong on a call.

Marcus: “Yes, hi Frank” – it’s Spencer.

Paul: I’m really sorry, I’m very sorry. I’m a selfish bad man. So what is it you do Ben?

Ben: I am one half of a company called Neutron Creations. We’re a web development studio.

Paul: Cool. So what’s your role there, what sort of stuff do you do?

Ben: I’m the front-end developer, so all the front-end stuff.

Paul: Right, and I presume your partner then is the back-end guy – that always sounds dodgy to me.

Ben: Correct. We’re like a big pantomime donkey.

Paul: So what are you working on, anything exciting?

Ben: We’re doing some work at the moment on authenticjobs.com. We’re just adding some new bits and pieces to that. I’m not gonna talk too much about them, but there’s exciting stuff coming there. Top secret.

Paul: Oooooh. Tantalising us with potential new things. So what kind of stuff are you really into at the moment? What do you think we should all be paying attention to?

Ben: I think we should all be paying attention to HTML5 and CSS3 because they’re a lot of fun. And we should stop worrying about them and stop worrying about the old browsers that don’t really deal with them too well and just move on.

Paul: So we’re just abandoning IE6 now are we?

Ben: I think so. Well thats unfair really, there are some projects where you have to pay attention to it, but for most things then I’m generally leaving it behind a little bit.

Paul: So when you say that you’re leaving it behind, do you mean that you’re just not designing for it at all, or you’re letting it degrade gracefully, what are talking about here?

Ben: It varies. It depends on the design because obviously some designs are more intricate and there are certain things that just aren’t gonna work. For most things though I typically code with IE in the back of mind, aware that certain things aren’t going to work . I make a note to come back to those later and just make sure that they don’t look completely disastrous. But generally I’m quite happy to deal with IE as it comes, at the end.

Paul: What about you guys, how do you deal with IE these days?

Drew: It’s increasingly getting to a situation where clients are happy to consider the fact that they might not have to have the site looking exactly the same in IE6. And there’s few enough people using it that as long as we’re covering IE6 and making sure that the site looks acceptable and looks professional and there aren’t things overlapping, all the content’s accessible, but perhaps it doesn’t have to look exactly the same in IE6. I think that’s a sensible approach.

Rachel: I think you can point out the cost as well, the actual financial cost of fully supporting IE6 in terms of some of the things we have to do and time we have to take to get the same visual effects working, particularly on a very advanced layout. So you can sell it as a benefit and say: “We can get it looking decent and maybe a little bit plainer in IE6 or we can spend the time, effort, and the money to try to get IE6 to look the same as IE8 or Firefox or whatever” and let them choose what they want to do.

Marcus: That’s exactly what we do. We have our IE6 development testing as a separate, normally quite expensive line in our proposals and it focuses clients’ minds on it. Works well.

Paul: So Ben, is that the same approach that you’re basically using – you’re providing a plainer version? – or are you going a step further and using Mr. Clarke’s “here’s the real dummy stylesheet for IE6 users”?

Ben: We’ve used a combination. On our own website we’re using Mr. Clarke’s IE6 universal stylesheet, but that’s our project, we are the client so we have a bit more leeway there. With client work, we have in the past said we can support these older browsers, we can go as far as to say that they’ll look identical, but you are gonna pay the cost for that because it’s gonna take another week or so to go back through the whole site and fix all the little bugs.

Marcus: Exactly.

Paul: Of course, when you talk about HTML5 and CSS3, you are talking about other browsers that don’t support all of the features of HTML5 and CSS3. So what are you doing with that, just accepting that different browsers have different looks and feels?

Ben: Another technique that we use is that we don’t really rely on certain features of CSS3 for essential stuff, it’s generally window dressing. Most of the time it’s fine to accept that these browsers are gonna have those additional feature – it’ll be things like transparency and rounded corners, all the usual stuff, gradient backgrounds, which you can always fall back onto other things for. It’s generally fine to accept that some people will be getting a better experience, but because they’ve downloaded this more advanced browser those people will be expecting a better experience and they’ll understand more about what’s going on. So it’s also about the level of the user who has come into your site. If it’s someone on IE6 in a corporate environment, they’re not going to appreciate all the finer details, it’s more likely that they’ll be closer to the lowest common denominator of user.

Paul: Yeah which is fair enough. Drew and Rachel, what are you guys doing in terms of some of the more advanced CSS properties like gradients and multi-columns? Are you actually using any of that stuff yourself?

Drew: It depends a lot on the audience. We’ve been working on a web app that’s aimed at students. From that we can assume a certain level of savviness in that they’re educated, they’re younger and perhaps they might be open to running browsers other than IE even on Windows. For the really advanced stuff – the columns, the gradients – we’re keeping clear of those because they are still so niche in terms of browser support and open to change. The last thing we want to do is implement something for a client and then find 6 months down the line, they’ve changed how they render it and all of a sudden the site’s looking a bit of a mess or not quite what the client was expecting. So you want to leave them with something that is reasonably stable. So for things like border-radius that’s stable enough, that’s been predictable for a long time. We can use that and know it’ll be ok. But gradients, maybe, maybe not. Certainly the column layouts, we’re talking pretty cutting-edge in terms of browser support.

Paul: I think the other aspect to it is that it has such a big impact if it’s not working. Even with a gradient, if it disappears it’s not the end of the world. If, however, multi-column isn’t supported then it’s gonna break the whole design in quite a fundamental way. But you’re saying, Ben, that occasionally you do use gradients and stuff like that?

Ben: Yeah, for example on the AuthenticJobs project, one of the things we’re doing is modifying the way that people change or select their job type when they are posting a new job listing. So we’ve got this fancy way of doing that and it’s very visual – you’ve got different cards for different job types, you can click on one and it will fade out the other ones, and there all very pretty and lovely. This is me taking designs from Cameron Moll and implementing those at the front end. He’s very realistic about graded browser support. So one of the things was a bevelled edge on the inside so it was like they had a two-step border, so a darker border round the outside and a lighter border on the inside for a shadowy/light effect. So I started out trying to do that with box-shadow because box-shadow has, in some browsers, a property called inset, which allows you to am the box shadow appear on the inside rather than the outside. Unfortunately that was only working in Firefox 3.6. It wasn’t working in any WebKit browsers and also box-shadow had recently been dropped from the CSS3 spec. You can mess around with these things a lot and experiment but at the end of the day you need something that’s going to work in at least most browsers. So what we ended up doing there was that we switched to border-image and we allowed it to degrade nicely, so if people didn’t have border-image all the padding, all the layout and spacing was fine, it was just they’d only get a 1px plain border than a glossy edge.

Paul: Which is fine. AuthenticJobs is aimed at a geek audience, so they have decent browsers, which I think helps massively.

Ben: Another thing we were using is this Javascript library called Modernizr, I think you’ve covered that before on the show, so that was very helpful. You can very easily target people who have support for these features and just deal with the ons who don’t very easily.

Paul: Which is brilliant. I quite like the idea of using some of these Javascript libraries that will, in effect, reduce the number of people that can’t view the effect you’ve got because they have to have (a) an old browser and (b) not have Javascript loaded. Rachel, what do you think in terms of these Javascript libraries where they supplement CSS?

Rachel: Personally, I prefer to take the approach of using specific Javascript to plug the holes. We tend to use jQuery anyway in our projects. Where I want to use a CSS3 selector that’s not supported in IE6/7, I tend to write a specific thing using jQuery rather than develop from the outset with a library that is patching things up. It’s personal preference, but I think where it’s just a few selectors I only need a few lines of Javascript, I don’t need a whole library to deal with that. And I’d also rather see where the problems are, see what happens if someone doesn’t have Javascript, add the Javascript but know that at the base level, someone who has got IE6 and no Javascript is still getting a good view of the site and can read everything and I’m not accidentally writing something that means that someone needs Javascript to see what I’m doing.

Paul: I get where you’re coming from on that, that makes a lot of sense. Ok. Sorry I’m just trying out new effects on my computer. I’ve discovered I can do camera-in-camera. It’s very exciting.

Rachel: It’s very distracting because I can see it up there.

Paul: We’ll move onto the wide shot where everybody’s in it.

Marcus: I just picked up on my Twitter feed – this is really important. One of our clients, the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, is on Twitter and I couldn’t help but notice their latest post: “Zombie worms found on whale bones.” What’s a zombie worm? Actual real zombie worms?

Paul: So what’s this got to do with web design?

Marcus: Nothing. Well their one of our clients.

Paul: I’ve had nothing to do with that project. Dave said “I don’t want Paul in it in any way.”

Marcus: Words to that effect: “We’d love to work with you as long as Paul has nothing to do with the project.”

Paul: Ok. That’s entirely understandable. That happens occasionally. So zombie worms, there we go. Ben, thank you very much for coming on the show. It was really good to talk to you. I apologise I didn’t know who you are. I won’t forget you now because I’ve been publicly humiliated in front of hundreds of people, which is always good.

Ben: It’s always the way. It was good to talk you too. Thanks. Bye.

Paul: It was a really good discussion.

Thanks goes to Simon Hamp for transcribing this segment.

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At Headscape we recently tendered for a piece of work that required an ecommerce solution.

After looking at the various technologies available we settled on Business Catalyst. It fulfilled almost all of our client’s requirements and because it was owned by Adobe we were confident in its long term health.

Chris Scott our Managing Director was running through his presentation the day before the pitch when quite by accident he discovered something – Business Catalyst did not work with Javascript disabled.

This put us in a very awkward position. It didn’t even occur to us that such a powerful product would fail on such a fundamental level. Approximately 5% of users have Javascript disabled and there was no way you would turn 1 in 20 people away from a bricks and mortar business, so why would you online.

We felt morally obliged to tell our prospective client and unsurprisingly we lost the job.

We decided to contact Business Catalyst to find out their position on the subject. Below is the email we received:

Hi Chris Scott,

I am sorry that you lost the deal with this prospect based on this requirement. To be honest, this has not come up much at all in our travels!

Per http://bit.ly/aN61Ur

“According to http://bit.ly/9o93Vi 95%-95% of browsers have javascript enabled. My experience of actual users on actual e-commerce sites is more like 99%.

Experience and research has shown that one page checkout reduces cart abandonment by upwards of 20%.
We think that losing 1% to gain 20% was a reasonable compromise.”

Even Magento, one of the more pervasive shopping cart technologies on the market has JS switched on.

http://bit.ly/ddHENp

And if you go to Amazon, many of the links/drop-downs do not work if you do not have javascript turned on.

So every site used on Magento, Ubercart, BC, and most other shopping cart solutions; and Amazon and probably 90% of other high profile shopping cart portals, do not meet your clients standards. Possibly they are being too pedantic. Of course, it is their prerogative to hold this viewpoint, and as such they must seek a solution that does look after these 0.5-1% of users.

As for BC, it will always require a browser to have JS turned on to work well, and in fact will only become more heavily weighted in that direction as we enhance the ecommerce solution.

I am sorry that in this instance we could not offer an alternate path/solution.

Regards,

Erin Murray
The Business Catalyst Team.

Setting aside that their entire response seems to be based on an employee from a competitors forum, there is a fundamental failure in the logic.

The argument put forward by Andy in the forum is that by enhancing their checkout process with Javascript you gain more sales than you lose. However, there is no reason you cannot enhance a site with Javascript and still offer a perfectly acceptable ecommerce experience for those who do not have it enabled. That is the wonder of progressive enhancement. Now, I can forgive a random forum guy for not knowing about progressive enhancement. However, I would expect more from those that develop ecommerce solutions on a daily basis.

And there in lies the problem. It would appear this is a problem that is affecting a huge number of sites built with big name ecommerce solutions. We tested websites built on a number of different technologies and found the majority inaccessible. Just some examples included:

• Crocs
• Planet Organic
• Garmin
• Calvin Klein
• Speedo
• Toys R Us

This is amazing when smaller solutions such as Shopify seem to work perfectly well without javascript enabled (based on some admittedly quick tests on my part).

Of course, none of this takes into account the moral or legal issues of excluding users that rely on technologies like screen readers. Personally I think it is reprehensible and I applaud our client for turning down our proposed technology. I only hope they find a better solution that does what they require and meets the needs of disabled users.

Anyway, what do you think? I have picked my words carefully in this post for fear of getting a call from somebodies lawyer! However, it strikes me as shameful that this has become an industry norm. Do you agree? Let me know in the comments below.

Update: We have been contacted by Business Catalyst

As you will see from the comments below we have been contacted by the head of Business Catalyst. They now seem to be taking a much more reasonable tone, saying that this is a problem they are intending to solve.

However this change is extremely confusing as they appear to have completely reversed their position. In the original email they said “As for BC, it will always require a browser to have JS turned on to work well, and in fact will only become more heavily weighted in that direction as we enhance the ecommerce solution.” Now they are saying ”for some time now we have had plans to introduce a non-JS reliant shopping experience which as many of your users here have mentioned, should only use Ajax and JS to enhance the shopping experience.”

Which is true? Only time will tell.

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This week in web design

This week: Why speculative work sucks, progressive enhancement explained, how to be different and should designers be able to code?

Read this week’s news stories

Feature: Is ‘John the client’ stupid or are you failing him?

Meet John the client. John runs a reasonably large website. He is a marketeer who considers himself smart, articulate and professional. That said, he doesn’t know much about web design and so needs your help.

Read this week’s feature

Reviews: Noded and Support Details

This week we have two reviews for the price of one. First we review the freelancing book ‘Noded’ and then take a look at a useful web application called ‘Support Details’.

Read this week’s reviews

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• Reviews: Noded and Support Details
• Is ‘John the client’ stupid or are you failing him?
• 134. Chrome
• Photoshop CS2
• Using forms with care

Brief writing really is a tricky skill to master.

Some agencies like to receive a brief that gives a steer as to the feeling, tone and style of a creative project. Others are far more concerned with the minutiae. And some prefer to write their own briefs based on a consultation with the client.

There is no right and wrong way to draw up a brief, save for the fact that good briefs will provide clear and detailed guidance to an agency, and in doing so produce good results. Bad briefs will do the reverse, wasting time and money and no doubt fraying nerves and tempers to varying degrees.

Web projects in particular have peculiarities all of their own, and in my experience this is for two reasons.

• Firstly they are a hybrid of pure design and technology. Most project managers will be well versed at briefing in creative projects such as print, but not all will have had experience in web projects.
• Secondly, it is often hard to know what level of detail to provide a web development agency when it comes to your technical requirements. Should all the guidance come from the agency? How do you know what you want when you have never been in this position before?

The simple answer is you can’t. But you can still write a detailed brief by following these simple steps, and vitally by knowing your own business. Whether you have managed a web project before or not, you will always know a lot more about what you do and don’t want than you might think. Crucially, don’t focus on the technical detail at the expense of the obvious. The list below might form the basis of your briefing document, with all the detail specific to your project tacked on as additional points.

In no particular order, here are ten ‘ignore them at your peril’ tips that any relative novice to a web project ought never to exclude from a brief.

As ever, we’d love to hear yours, so be sure to add them to the comments at the bottom of the page.

1. Budget

There really is no benefit in withholding something as crucial as this, and yet very often that is the case. If you don’t have a fixed budget then perhaps specify a price bracket that you are comfortable with – “between £10,000 – £15,000.” The real reason an agency will want to see a budget is so they can better tailor their recommendation to your expectations. It may be that the best solution to your problem is a site with online ordering, or perhaps a community forum, but if this is not within budget it is therefore discounted. With this, as with every other element of a briefing document, it makes so much sense to be open and honest. It will save you a lot of time in the long run.

2. What do your users want?

It might sound like a simplistic statement, but it is rare brief indeed that is written from the perspective of the users. More often a website is built based on what the client wants the public to see of them and their services, rather than thinking of how the site might better aid their customers or prospects. Again, this is a simple wrong that you can right just by knowing your business. Speak to your customers and get them involved in the briefing process. Ask them how your new website might improve your working relationship? Could it offer functionality to make processes easier? Ask as many of your customers as you are able and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised as to how keen they generally are to be consulted in such a process. When you put this down in writing to your agency, think about creating a pen portrait of your typical customer. Typically what are they like, what do they do with their spare time and their spare money. Bring them to life a little.

3. What do your staff want?

Again, very often overlooked. If you work in a medium to large sized organisation, I would put money on it that you will have numerous processes that could be made easier or even automated by the clever use of a website or an online application. And all you have to do is take the time to consult your staff and bring them into the project planning process. Perhaps you have staff who spend time posting details to customers – this could be handled online with a support section or with downloadable documents. For companies of 50 staff and over I’d strongly suggest consulting all team leaders or managers as to how a website could free up their staff’s time, allowing them to focus on other more vital tasks. You need to ensure that by the time you consult an agency to design and build your site you have considered every way in which that site can streamline back office functions.

4. What Sites You Like

And not just a page of links please. Do some structured online research of what websites might be useful to present to the agencies. This should not be seen solely as a beauty contest where you just present designs that you like. Try to find sites that meet some pre-determined criteria. For instance:

• Links to your competitors’ sites
• Which of these have clever functionality (which, what, and why is it of interest?)
• What sites have design features that I like (any sites, what features do you like and why)
• What sites have a photographic style that you like?
• Any sites that have a typographic style / tone of voice that appeals

In all cases be as specific as you can as to what it is that appeals to you about the sites you list, being mindful at all times as to how these design features or functions will benefit your users, rather than letting your own preferences get the better of you. If your marketing team have a style guide detailing how your branding must be used then that will clearly need to be sent to your agency before they put together designs.

5. How Do You Update Your Site?

It’s a given that a site that is regularly updated with useful and interesting content will attract attention and drive brand allegiance. This much we know. So with that in mind you need to think practically about how you and your business plan to produce this content. As Paul Boag has pointed out, as a project manager your role needs to be one of a ‘brand evangelist,’ encouraging people at your organisation to get behind the website and to produce content and ideas that keep it fresh and engaging. Being clear about what content you are able to produce, what content you need to produce, and specifically who will be doing it, will be invaluable when you scope out what Content Management System you require. It will also help you put in place a web editor or editorial team within your organisation that is already gathering material ready for launch, while the site is still in production.

Do you have any provision in house to resize graphics? Can you source and edit photography if you need to update images? If not then you will need to be mindful that your agency doesn’t produce a design that relies on retouched photography that you can’t maintain. All this detail is, as I hope you can see, crucial.

6. Content Management Systems

Now it’s quite possible that you have either never even heard of branded Content Management Systems, or if you have your experience of using them might be limited. And that’s fine. Being realistic about exactly what level of control you require over a site is fundamental to ensuring that you (a) get the system that is right for you and (b) save money by not developing unnecessary features. So often I hear that question asked ‘What level of control do you want over your sites contents?’ to which the reply is always the same – ‘total control.’ The questions ought to be ‘what level of control do you really need over your sites’ content?’ Hopefully you now know exactly what content you will be producing in which case you will know what level of CMS edibility you must have, and any further functionality you can afford is a bonus. This level of detail is essential for an agency to accurately price, and there is little point in them spending weeks (as they may do) constructing a CMS where only a small percentage of its capabilities are actually used.

Here more than anywhere the devil is in the detail. Think about exactly what control you need. Is it just over text? Do you need to update images? If so, on what pages? Do you need to add files for download, create links, create pages, restructure pages, display news or content from third party sites or provide a facility for customers to comment or get in touch? Don’t assume that any of the above comes as ’standard’ with any website. Granted they are common requests, but if you are to give clear instructions to an agency, and vitally get value for money, think about exactly what you want well in advance.

7. Timings

OK, another obvious one. And one that is common to any endeavour right? Building a website, producing a brochure or building a shed. You need to know what is involved and when it’s needed. But websites still often catch people out. More so than any other project they tend to invite opinions from all corners. Some advice to help you on your way with this one; be clear from the beginning who makes up the website project team at your organisation, what the process of approval is, and who is sourcing content. Note the last point. Who is sourcing content? Possibly the greatest cause of delays in web projects come from an under-appreciation of just how much time it takes to source images, text and quotes for the site. Bear in mind that this goes on alongside your day job. Ensure you allow time for sourcing the material and getting approval from your management team. You may also wish to show any new designs to customers to source some opinions from those people who matter most. Presenting accurate timings to an agency will result in a far smoother project. Agencies can anticipate work better, and therefore allocate the best resource to the project.

8. Measure your Success

Has it worked? How will we know? Has it addressed the problem we had before, or do we have the same problem only with new pictures and copy? Put simply, this part of the brief will encourage you to distil precisely what the problem is that you are addressing with a new site. Then you need to address directly how you will judge whether the new site has been a success. That might be an increase in enquiries, newsletter signup, sales, visits or a drop in telesales calls as people rely on online ordering. Either way, be clear about this so you can put in place a method to record this data. It might be an analytics package that does this, or it might be training for telesales to encourage them to ask how a customer learnt of a promotion. Either way, this needs to be thought about in advance and communicated to the agency so they fully understand all factors they need to consider to achieve your goal, and then provide clear evidence of that.

9. The Future

How do you see the site progressing in the years to come? This is another reason why it is so crucial to have a website working party within your organisation, and for you to encourage people to take part in the sourcing and publishing of new information. If you have a vision for the future of the site then communicate this to your agency, as they can not only make recommendations as to how this might be achieved, but they can also factor this in to their initial designs. Have you scheduled any surround activity that will promote the launch of the site? Perhaps you have PR launching, radio, advertising or e-marketing all set to coincide with the live date of the site. For goodness sake don’t keep this a secret as all of this will be crucial for you web agency to know.

10. What exactly is it that you do?!

Never assume that your agency will simply understand what it is that your business or product does! And never assume that they don’t need to know what you do because they are simply building a site from copy and images supplied. Take time to give a short(ish) description of what your business does. Explain what sets you apart from your competitors, and what is special about your approach to your work. Agencies will work with a lot of customers who each offer a variety of services, and once they understand exactly how your business operates you can benefit from their experience in servicing similar operations online.

More advice

Writing a good brief is just one of the challenges faced by website owners. For more advice on everything from hiring a web designer to planning the long term future of your website, buy the Website Owners Manual by Paul.

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Noded – The Untouchable

Hello, my name is James Callaghan. I’m an in-house web designer and developer / generalist working for Marshall Aerospace at the Airport in Cambridge and also work freelance.

Before I start, do you know what a Noded Team is?

The entire book, all eighty six pages of the book, attempt to explain what Noded is. During the first few chapters it attempts to cover definitions and examples, which I found a little hard to take in. It took me a few attempts to learn what Noded is, reading a few pages again and again.

With what Noded was vaguely drilled into my head, continuing on, the book focuses on freelancing with tips and advice on many maters such as setting up a business, planning things to managing time. This was of huge interest to me and the book became slightly easier to read.

Though out the book Andreas and Jaan describe their methods and tips on various subjects relating to Noded Working and Freelancing.

One section I did enjoy to read was “A space to work” that explains how important it is to find the right place to work. “As a web worker you can work from any place you fancy – a library, coffee shop, or park bench”.

Most of the time however, it’s nice to have a more personal place to work from.” I’m under the same opinion as Andreas and Jaan – “crappy office, crappy output”, “inspiring office, nice quality output”.

A subject that makes me very sore with my recent data loss that I can say I already adhere to is the tools for the game and why you should use the cloud over your hard drive. With explanations how applications force you to use their logic and structure and therefore are really tiresome and in the end the application is abandoned; instead suggests using cloud based web-apps that are far more flexible and forgiving, examples include: Email, Calendars, Get Things Done (GTD), Project Management, Synced Files, RSS Feeds.

On a more back office subject the book explains why working an 8 hour day is dead to tips on how to break away from the traditional meeting.

I take the same approach as the book, my ideas and creativity cannot materialise on command. They come at the most in-convenient times when I’m not working such as in the show, out on a ride on my bike or whilst out walking my dog. The book suggests using a tool and allowing people to contribute in advance of the meeting, following up with a simple 15 minute meeting to make a decision on the project or simply brief everyone involved.

An idea I am looking forward trialling in the real life! “The 8 hour workday is dead. We don’t believe that being

“being at work” for 8 hours accomplishes more than working for 4 hours, 2 days or 5 minutes. Work is about accomplishments, not measuring time. It is about being effective versus being efficient – doing your job faster and better versus simply doing more work”.

Not sure how to approach my manager on this one though, it is all about the hours here but way to think of it is:

“when you buy a music track that you really like, does it matter whether the artist spent two hours or two months writing the song? Probably not. Does a bowl of pasta taste better if the chef spent more time on it than if he spent the right amount of time on it? Probably not.”

In short, the book has really given me some great tips and methods as to how I should approach my freelance work but also provided me with some great ideas how to handle projects and work within the organisation I work in.

As I read through the book I found myself wanting to know more about something that had be written so instead of getting distracted whilst reading the book, I created a “list” of the pages with references and URLs I wanted to know more about.

The question I asked before reviewing the book was:

“do you know what a Noded Team is?”

If you answered at all, I suggest grabbing a copy of this book and truly discovering what Noded is all about. If you didn’t here is a dictionary definition included in the book.

“Noded Network, a Node Team. A group of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically far apart, that come together to form temporary or recurring project teams. Unlike ‘distributed teams’ Noded teams work for a wide range of clients and any member of a Noded team can take the lead to bring in work, manage work and choose their team members.”

Lastly I would like to say that I have really enjoyed reviewing this book and would like to take a moment to thank Paul and the team for producing such a great podcast but also to Ryan for his time and patience with me as it has taken me quite some time to produce this review. I’ve had to teach my brain how to read again, but also how to write a review that makes sense.

Support Details

My name is Nora Brown; I wanted to let you and Boagworld listeners know about a really handy site I’ve come across. I’m a freelance web designer who does a lot of sites for writers, artists, and small business owners – not necessarily the most tech-savvy folks. Sometimes they don’t even know that they’re using a browser, much less what specific version of IE they might be using.

So to help diagnose problems, I direct them to www.supportdetails.com. From this website, they can simply email you, and it sends you all the details of their browsing environment. You can even give them a link with your email address pre-filled in. An added bonus is that it includes their IP address, so you can create a filter in Google Analytics to exclude their own site visits from their stats.

Again, that’s supportdetails.com. I hope you find it useful.

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John comes to you with a clear set of business objectives and asks for a quote. What happens next leaves John confused, frustrated and extremely unhappy.

Explain why you are asking about money.

Before giving John his quote you ask a little more about the project. After chatting for a few minutes you ask him about his budget. A fair enough question you think. After all there are so many ways you could approach the project. Without knowing the budget it is impossible to know where to begin.

In your mind, building a website is like building a house. Without knowing the budget you can’t possibly know how many rooms the client can afford or what materials you should use to build.

John on the other hand is instantly suspicious. Why would you want to know his budget? The only reason he can think of is that you want to make sure you don’t under charge when there is more money available. Anyway, he doesn’t really know his budget. How the hell is he supposed to know how much a website costs?

Image credit : Be careful not to come across as money grabbing.

John goes away determined to find a web designer who isn’t trying to screw him over. Fortunately for you all of the other designers he asks also fail to explain why they need to know about his budget and so you manage to win the project anyway.

Justify recommendations in language John can understand.

Once you have won the job you arrange a kickoff meeting to nail down the final specification. However, John is instantly regretting his decison to hire you as his worse fears are confirmed.

In his eyes you are immediately trying to squeeze more money out of him as you waffle on about the importance of usability and accessibility.

John doesn’t care about disabled users. No disabled users use his website anyway!

As for usability, surely it is the job of the web designer to make the website usable. Why do we need expensive usability testing? He is pretty sure usability testing involves expensive things like cameras, usability labs and two way mirrors.

Unfortunately you believe you have explained the issues clearly. You talked about WCAG 2 and mentioned Jacob Neilsen. You are beginning to wonder if John is stupid.

Image credit : Avoid technobabble if you want your clients to understand what you are talking about.

Maybe if you had talked about accessibility in terms of search engine rankings and usability testing as a way to increase conversion then John might have listened. As it is John puts his foot down and refuses to pay for any of these ‘ unnecessary extras’.

Include John in the process.

You go away from the kickoff meeting pleased to have a signed contract. However you have the feeling in the pit of your stomach that this is going to be another one of ‘those’ projects. Nevertheless you pick yourself up and dive into the design process.

Almost immediately you get a phone call from John asking if there is anything for him to see. You explain that it is still early days and that that you are not ready to present. John sounds disappointed but resigned.

A short while later you are ready to present the design to John. You are really pleased with the result. It has taken a lot more time than you budgeted for but it was worth it. The final design is extremely easy to use and will make a great portfolio piece.

Image credit : Stop hiding from your clients. Show them work early and include them in the process.

When John sees the design he is horrified. From his perspective you have entirely missed the point. The design clashes with his offline marketing material and fails to focus on the right selling points. Also he is convinced his suppliers will hate it and although they are not the end user, their opinions matter.

After a tense conference call you go away demoralised but with a compromise that will hopefully make John happy. You wonder in hindsight whether it would have been better to show John some of your initial ideas and sketches. Perhaps you should have produced a wireframe first.

Educate John about design.

After much agonising and compromise you are once again ready to present to John.

John is much happier with the new design and feels it is heading in the right direction. However, he does have some concern. For a start he has to scroll to get to most of the content and yet there is empty whitespace on either side of the design. He tells you to move key content into this wasted space.

Also as he thinks about his young male target audience he realises that the colour scheme is probably too effeminate, so he tells you to change it to blue.

While John is feeling somewhat happier you are feeling crushed. It feels like he is doing your job for you. The string of feedback about moving this and changing the colour of that, feels like it has reduced you to pushing pixels.

By this stage you are sure the client is stupid, and just want the design signed off. At no stage do you stop to ask John why he is requesting these changes. Perhaps if you had understood his thinking then you could have explained concepts like screen resolution or suggested an alternative to corporate blue which is so massively overused on the web.

Image credit : Educate your clients so they make more informed decisions.

Instead you wash your hands of the design and just give John what he wants.

Communicate with John regularly.

Now that the design is complete you turn your attention to the site build. At least John won’t care about your code. Now you can finally do things right.

Its a big job and it takes a lot of time. Even though you put too much time into the design and then washed your hands of it, you have your pride. You are not about to cut corners with the code. After all other web designers might look at it and judge you!

You work damn hard, putting in more work than you probably should do. John even managed to slip some extra functionality in at the scoping phase, which turns out to be a pain in the ass.

John on the other hand is wondering what is going on. He hasn’t heard from you in weeks. Surely the site must be read now? He decides to drop you an email asking how things are progressing. You reply with a short email saying everything is progressing nicely. After all, you never did like project management and you are sure John would prefer you building his site rather than writing him detailed emails.

John receives your email and finds himself becoming increasingly frustrated. What does ‘progressing nicely’ mean? He writes back asking for an expected completion date and you reply with a rough estimate.

The date comes and goes without a word from you. After all it was only an estimate and several complications have delayed things by a few days.

John finally looses his temper and calls you. He has arranged a marketing campaign to coincide with the launch date you and because he hadn’t heard from you he presumed everything was on schedule.

Image credit : Make sure you are communicating with your client regularly.

You try to defend yourself against John by citing the scope creep and unexpected difficulties. However, it is hard to respond when John said ‘all I needed was a weekly email keeping me up-to-date on progress’.

Explain John’s ongoing role.

By this stage the relationship has broken down entirely. You finish the work and the site finally launches. Begrudgingly John pays the invoice after delaying it for as long as possible.

What amazes you the most is that John says he is bitterly disappointed with the final result. How can that be when you gave him exactly what he asked for? This guy isn’t just stupid, he is also a jerk!

Of course John sees things differently. He came to you with a list of business objectives he wanted to achieve and the site failed to meet any of them.

He hoped that he could launch the website, see it meet its objective, and move on to the next project. Instead, after an initial spike in interest the number of users and enquiries fell overtime and the site stagnated.

Image credit : Ensure your client understands the ongoing care his website will need.

What John did not realise is that sites need continue love and support. You cannot build it and then abandon it. John needed to nurture his website by adding new content, engaging with his visitors and having an ongoing plan for development.

If only somebody had told him.

The morale of the story.

It is amazing me how quick we are to judge our clients.

As web designers we communicate and empathise for a living. Our job is to communicate a message to our client’s users. We create usable sites by putting yourselves in the position of the site visitor. This allows us to design around their needs.

Why then do we so often seem incapable of either empathising or communicating with our clients?

Perhaps it is time for us to use the skills we have grown as web designers and apply them to our own customers.

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PPK recently wrote an excellent article on the state of mobile web development. If you ignore the fact that he is ranting uncontrollably he is actually making some superb points…

We laughingly disown every single principle the web standards movement has ever stood for in the past ten years in order to swoon and drool over Apple’s iCandy and happily accept the reality distortion field that emanates from it.

The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we’ll have the real mobile web that wasn’t made by us and doesn’t give a shit about web standards and best practices.

Worse, it seems web developers are happy with this state of affairs. It seems web developers are congratulating themselves on excluding 85% of the smartphone users. They certainly never bother to check their sites in S60 WebKit, the largest smartphone browser in the world.

via QuirksMode

Although every word rings true, it would be good to have some more constructive advice. Part of the reason so many web developers fixate on the iPhone is because it is easier to develop for. It would be great if PPK could give us some advice about developing for other mobile platforms.

What do you say PPK?

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Why speculative design suck

The debate over speculative design has once again raised its head this week.

In case you are unfamiliar with the concept of speculative design, it is best described as the process of producing free work for a prospective client in the hopes of winning a project.

Many agencies (including Headscape) have long since rejected the idea of speculative design. However, it is still common practice within the web design community.

This week Andy Budd lays out his arguments against speculative work. Although Andy raises some good points I feel he misses the heart of the issue which is that speculative work is bad for the client.

A better argument is put forward by one Belgium Agency who is currently on strike protesting against speculative work. They write on their website…

Pitches use up energy. Energy an agency would normally use to provide its existing, paying customers with the best possible work. So the logical conclusion of the system as it now stands is that at some point you will become a victim of it yourself. The day will eventually come when your agency has to divert the creative and strategic energy you’re paying it for into a pitch for someone else’s business.

I put it even more bluntly in my own article on the subject…

In order to remain in business every company needs to recover their cost of sale. This includes web designers. As speculative work is part of the sales process, they ultimately have to charge you for it. The web designer is forced to roll the cost of that work into the project if they win.

However, it is worse than that. The web designer also has to recover the cost of speculative design done for jobs he did not win. This means that if you choose to work with an agency that produces speculative design, you are paying for their failed sales pitches! Why should you be paying for other people’s design work?

So before you next request speculative work I would encourage you to read my post on the subject.

What is progressive enhancement?

As web designers we do love our jargon. One example is the phrase ‘progressive enhancement’. I have even been known to throw the term around casually on the show with little in the way of explanation. However, I bet that a considerable number of the website owners listening (and probably more than a few of the web professionals) do not know what the term means.

Fortunately our very own Paul Stanton has provided a great analogy that explains progressive enhancement.

He explains how progressive enhancement can be seen in video games all the time, especially the big sports titles that span all of the various consoles. Each console has different capabilities with an xbox having consider more processing power than your iPhone.

The result is that although it is fundamentally the same game on all platforms it is actually subtly different in terms of game play and graphics.

Paul explains that this is very similar to progressive enhancement on the web. Each browser has different capabilities and as web designers we build to make the most of what each browser can do. It is the same website but subtly different depending on the platform.

Its a good analogy that I will be using in the future because it draws on something that the majority of people can associate with – video games.

How to be different

We walk a fine line with our websites. On one hand we want them to meet user expectations and avoid making users think too hard. On the other we want our sites to stand out from the crowd and be memorable.

In a new article on the Carsonified blog Kat Neville attempts to walk that line while challenging us to move away from Cookie Cutter websites.

The article is a challenge both to designers who tend to get caught up in the latest trend, and websites owners who are often overly conservative in terms of design. It aims to inspire with some great examples of sites that break the mould and do things differently.

Of course the suggestions are not going to be relevant to every site. You need to carefully consider your target audience to establish how far from the norm you are able to push a design. However whatever your site, it will challenge you to ask if you are just following the crowd or really thinking about design.

Should web designers be able to code?

An interesting argument has exploded on twitter this week and has since spilled over into the blogosphere too. The argument was sparked by Elliot Jay Stocks who wrote:

I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs.

It would appear this was a somewhat controversial comment and led to a massive backlash from designers who do not code.

For fear of inflaming the debate further, I have to say I am amazed anybody could disagree with this statement. Admittedly not every web designer does code, however they should at least know how.

I am not going to layout the arguments for this position here. However, I would suggest you read three excellent posts on the subject…

• Elliot Jay Stocks – Web designers who can’t code
• Mike Kus – 5 reasons why designers should code
• Mark Boulton – On designers writing HTML

If you happen to be a designer who cannot code, I strongly recommend you read these posts. I honestly believe you are limiting your potential and undermining the product you provide your clients.

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• No more speculative designs
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As you will know if you listen to the podcast we have had sponsors at the beginning of the show for sometime. However, with the introduction of Boagworld Bitesizes we are going to change the format so those sponsors are associated with a particular section of the show. That means we will have sponsors for…

• News
• Interview / Feature
• Listeners content

Two of these three slots we are going to sell as normal advertising opportunities (for details on our rates drop us an email). However, for the third slot we wanted to do something a little bit different.

Instead of simply offering the third slot to the highest bidder we want to hold an audition. If you have a great product that you think the boagworld audience will love, drop us an email including the following information…

• The name of your product.
• A 50 word description of your product.
• A url where we can learn more information.
• How much you can afford to pay for the advertising slot.

Although we do want people to pay for the slot, the amount you can afford is not the deciding factor. We want to make sure that we select the best product available for our audience and so price is secondary.

If you are selected you will appear on four shows and will receive the following for your money…

• A 15 second audio introduction that will be at the top of your section both in the main podcast and in the bitesize version. You can listen to an example of audio sponsorship here.
• A text advertisment in the bitesize show notes. See an example below.

After the four week’s is up, the winner either has the option to continue advertising at the full rate or to stop. If they stop we will look at the other entrants and select one of them to take over the slot. So keep sending those entrances in. Even if you don’t make it to through the first round there will be future opportunities!

I hope you like the idea.

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• 200. A taste of the show
• After 200 episodes is it time to change Boagworld?
• Add Google maps to your site
• Don’t panic!
• boagworld.com web feeds

Yes I know we are all getting a little bored to hearing about HTML5 and in particular the near magical canvas tag that will save everyone of us. However, if you are like me and don’t really entirely understand canvas yet you may want to check out this demo from Mozilla. It really does look quite exciting.

Now of course none of this is universally available yet. However, its nice to know there is some fun stuff coming

Similar Posts:

• 124. HTML 5
• 184. HTML5
• After 200 episodes is it time to change Boagworld?
• 199. Time to generalise
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