To great fanfare, The Queen, in the company of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, unveiled the new British Monarchy website today. Unfortunately, what they unveiled was a real dog’s dinner.
Royal.gov.uk highlights the worst elements of the practice of web development; on only the second page I visited it became obvious that the site hasn’t been tested on any browser other than Internet Explorer, and a peek at the source code left me shocked.
I’ve just finished reading John Allsopp’s book ‘Microformats: empowering your markup for Web 2.0‘, and thought it deserved a review here – marked up, of course, with hReview. I was given a free copy at the recent Microformats vEvent, but hope that hasn’t coloured my review at all. Markup for the review was generated by the hReview creator (and slightly modified by myself).
As promised, slightly more detailed notes on the sessions at FoWD (further links to presentations to follow). In chronological order:
I missed the beginning of this, but it seemed to be pretty sage, if not rather commonsense, advice (don’t just use websites for web design inspiration), as well as some notes on current trends and tips on future ones; soft colours, more use of horizontal space, more video.
Set up as a confrontation, but in fact both speakers were at pains to point out that both should be thought of together. Andy Clarke adds: don’t be afraid to fail, we learn from our mistakes.
Yesterday I attended the Future Of Web Design London event in Kensington (along with my lovely wife). Unfortunately I’ve been suffering from some stinking virus for the past couple of days, which left me uncomfortable, occasionally in pain, and irritated. Please bear in mind that this may have coloured my perception of the event somewhat; also, please accept my apologies if you were at the event and start to suffer the same symptoms in a few days.
I’ll write short reviews of the individual sessions at a later date, but my general opinion is that it was just OK; it dealt more in current design trends than future, almost all of which you probably already know if you keep up to date with sites like A List Apart or some of the better blogs. Although that’s not to say it was a complete waste of time; few of the speakers were less than interesting, and there are always new techniques to learn or existing techniques to reinforce.
Some of the speakers suffered from not having worked (or, at least, not for a long time) in a regular agency position (if I may coin a phrase, coal-face web development), and their advice was therefore useful on a theoretical basis only. Sure, it would be great if we could make mistakes in public and make constant revisions to our websites, but who pays for that? The client almost certainly won’t. We think ourselves lucky to have some clients who are savvy enough to make annual revisions to their sites! And while I’d love to just “get better clients”, that’s just not how the real world works for those of us who don’t work at start-ups or own our own agencies.
In summary, then, compared to last year’s @media, which I found genuinely inspiring, this was ‘only’ interesting. I’ll give careful consideration as to whether or not I attend again next year.
CushyCMS is a very simple, nice idea for allowing users to edit content on their website without giving them access to the templates. It doesn’t allow changes to mark-up or style sheets, only titles, images and blocks of copy.
It requires that the site admin marks up the blocks that will be editable by adding class="cushycms" to their containing elements; the web-based application will then automatically find each marked element in the pages you assign to it and open a text area (with or without WYSIWYG editor) allowing the user to edit.
In its current state it wouldn’t be suitable for sites with a lot of pages, but if you run a small, brochure-type site for a customer who wanted to make occasional updates, this could be a better solution in some cases than installing a full database-powered CMS.
I’d prefer it to have a better WYSIWYG editor, and it would be more useful if the interface could be branded and hosted on your own server. However, the creators are open to feedback and these ideas and many others have been suggested already.
While it may not (yet?) be the answer to all your content management requirements, CushyCMS is a neat, clever little app that would be useful for small businesses or for small clients. It’s currently in Private Beta only, but if you watch the introductory video closely, that won’t be a barrier to entry.
As just about everyone in the development community must know by now, Microsoft released a first Beta of IE8 today. I’ve been testing it for the last hour or so, and here are some notes I’ve made – the first of which is that this is really more of an Alpha than a Beta; there are a lot of bugs and errant behaviours.
One of the first things I noticed was that the browser comes with a limited set of development tools built in. They’re not well integrated, they’re not very extensive, and they’re not easy to use; but they’re there.