Andrew Martin

What all web sites should have

Andrew Martin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:12:00 GMT

Selene Bowlby has written a post titled "15 Key Elements All Top Web Sites Should Have" which lists things every web site should have.

Good Visual Design
Thoughtful User Interface
Primary Navigation Above The Fold
Repeat Navigation In The Footer
Meaningful Content
A Solid About Page
Contact Information
Search
Sign-Up / Subscribe
A site map
Separate Design from Content
Valid XHTML / CSS
Cross Browser Compatibility
Web Optimized Images
Statistics, Tracking and Analytics

Most of these make sense but there are some others that I think could be added

Findability plan
Community / Social web elements
Mobile / print versions
Maintenance / update strategy
Date displayed when content was last updated / reviewed

I'm sure there are a load of others that you could add but the most difficult thing is to keep up with the rate of change. Therefore I think the most important thing is to have a web platform which is easy to adapt and change over time.

Tags: Web Development , Web Design , Selene Bowlby

Metia wins Web Marketing Association Award

Andrew Martin — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:55:00 GMT

Congratulations to the Virtual Event team here at Metia for their recent success in winning a Web Marketing Association Award in the Computer : Software category.

Here's to many more.

Microsoft on cloud nine with Azure

Andrew Martin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:20:00 GMT

Yesterday at their Professional Developers Conference in LA, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure their new cloud services platform and to support it, the www.azure.com site, which our team built. It's great to see a site which has such huge importance for a client go live, and that all the effort the team has put into making this happen as smoothly as possible is rewarded with a faultless delivery.

Looking at coverage this morning, Azure seems to have created a lot of buzz in the industry. Mary Jo Foley has a post titled "Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed" if you want a description.

Steve Clayton also has a good post in which he lists some of the Microsoft resources available.

Just to round off our involvement, Metia teams were also involved in producing customer reference materials (a tough assignment for a brand new service offering) and supporting analyst relations activity.

Tags: Azure , Cloud Computing , Steve Clayton , Mark Jo Foley , Microsoft

Designers you need to adopt a developer

Andrew Martin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:44:00 GMT

Last week was MIX in the UK and we had quite a few of the team attending.

It was a good couple of days, meeting people and talking about what we and they were doing. One of the recurring themes seemed to be the continued integration of design and development teams when working on Silverlight type projects.

This is something that we’ve been doing for a while now, moving everyone around so that they sit next to each other when working on projects, making sure they have joint project ownership, regular integration sessions, regular deployments, etc. Over the last year or so, this has totally changed how we work, not just on these projects but on everything we do, and while the technology has accelerated us into improving things, the bit I find most encouraging is the impetus that this has provided to continually challenge and improve how we work. A great ethos for all companies.

From a technical perspective the ADO.NET Data Services presentation seems to have been the one which the developers enjoyed the most.

At Mix I went to more of the design focused sessions, a few of which were presented by Bill Buxton and while his presentation style may take a little getting used to you, can certainly get value from what he’s saying. One of my favourite bits was his ‘Long Nose of Innovation’ concept which he published on Business Week.

I’ve seen this happen, sometimes with a long time frame, sometimes with it being short, but on the whole it’s always there. I’ve spent some of the weekend trying to think about what I can do to shorten the time frame more consistently. I’ve not come up with any concrete ideas yet but definitely got a few options which I’m going to try out. I’ll try to post those that work.

Tags: MIX , Bill Buxton , Silverlight , The Long Nose of Innovation , ADO.NET Data Services

The World's Best Presentation

Andrew Martin — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:16:00 GMT

Here are the World's Best Presentations as voted for by Guy Kawasaki, Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds and Bert Decker for Slideshare.

The winner is this one about the shortage of water called Thirst

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

Tags: Presentations , slideshare , Guy Kawasaki , Nancy Duarte , Garr Reynolds Bert Decker

Microsoft does the Pepsi challenge

Andrew Martin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:35:00 GMT

Microsoft have launched a site called the Mojave Experience and the views on it have been quite wide ranging.

From comparing it to the Milgram experiments in the 60's.
To being critical of people who aren't tech savvy enough to use Vista
To what if Apple had done it
To why did they use Flash for it rather than Silverlight
and a whole load in between

On the whole I think that the Microsoft marketing team were trying to do a good thing and demonstrate that a lot of the feelings about Vista were based on hearsay rather than experience of using it.

Yes I agree that you can make a number of things look better than they actually are in a demo, just ask most start ups, but they have included some videos of people who picked that what they were looking at was Vista.

Personally I'm a Vista user and find it OK. As with most OS's there are some good and some bad bits my team enjoy nothing more than watching me struggle with one of our Linux or OS X test boxes. I don't complain about it I see them as other operating systems in the market that as web professionals we need to be aware of and build solutions which work well on them. I just don't use them every day so will always be a little slower on them and not know all the things they can do. I'm sure that if somebody showed me a top notch demo of Vista I'd hardly recognise some of it either.

Maybe Microsoft should go the whole hog and provide a copy of Vista and a video camera to 100 people and get them to record what they think of their first month of using Vista. I doubt they will.

Full disclosure Microsoft is a client.

Tags: Mojave Experiment , Microsoft , Flash , Silverlight , Vista

The survey for people who make websites

Andrew Martin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:28:00 GMT

After the success of last year's survey where almost 33,000 web professionals took the List Apart survey they're running it again.

Take it here.

Tags: A List Apart

If fonts were people

Andrew Martin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:15:00 GMT

Via Digg

For all you designers out there

10 Downing Street is getting a new website

Andrew Martin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:25:00 GMT

Hat tip to Puffbox that 10 Downing Street is soon to be releasing a new website, looks like a big improvement.

You can read their post here but in short

Wordpress based
More video
Streamlined navigation
no go live date as of yet

Tags: 10 Downing Street , Puffbox , Wordpress

The 10 Commandments of Web Design

Andrew Martin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:22:00 GMT

Business week has an interesting article titled The 10 Commandments of Web Design.

It lists these as

Thou shalt not abuse Flash
Thou shalt not hide content
Thou shalt not clutter
Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections
Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels
Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography
Thou shalt create immersive experiences
Thou shalt be social
Thou shalt embrace proven technologies
Thou shalt make content king

Interesting that Amazon and YouTube feature in both their best and worst list.

I agree with most of them but their description for Number 9 : Thou shalt embrace proven technologies is

"Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and their cohorts have become a part of daily life. Sites that can incorporate these elements into their design will connect with users in a meaningful way by providing functionality and an interface with which they're already familiar."

Surely they can't describe Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook as technologies. What does that make .NET, PHP, XML, JavaScript, and their cohorts?

Surprising there was nothing in there about accessibilty or web standards.

Tags: Business Week , Web Technologies , Web Design

It's the little things that count in web development

Andrew Martin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:04:00 GMT

I often listen to the radio through the BBC's excellent iPlayer while working but the link in my browser was to the older version. Now that they seem to have stopped publishing all the shows to it I had to update the link, I didn't actually know there was a newer version otherwise I would have updated it a lot quicker.

Check out the volume, its a great little touch which puts a smile on your face every time you want to change the volume.

More web designers should add this kind of feature/detail into sites.

Tags: iPlayer , BBC

New Balance the Marmite of the sports world

Andrew Martin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:58:00 GMT

I saw an ad recently for New Balance's Love/Hate advertising campagin and rather than me wanting to go and buy a pair, it normally doesn't take too much encoragement for me to buy a new pair of shoes, all I could think of was Marmite.

There's a slight difference in their adverting style

Maybe its a British thing.

Tags: New Balance, Marmite

Creating delightful experiences

Andrew Martin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:59:00 GMT

Once again Reboot was very enjoyable but due to some hardware issues I wasn't able to get online, I think this may have made it more enjoyable it certainly meant I paid more attention to what people were saying.

This year seemed to be the year of white writing on black backgrounds as most presentations seemed to have this.

One of the most enjoyable was Andy Budd's packed out presentation on Designing the User Experience Curve.

You can check out the whole presentation on Slideshare.

Tags: Andy Budd, Reboot

Check out the Virgin Eye

Andrew Martin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:02:00 GMT

Virgin have launched what they're calling the Virgin Eye.

Check it out here

It shows which stories are being written about Virgin companies in a nice graphical manner. My favorite is when you have Beautify on and you see new stories arriving.

The one thing that seems to be missing is displaying stories about itself.

Tags: Virgin Eye, Virgin, Data Visualization

Time for the yearly Reboot

Andrew Martin — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:06:00 GMT

Reboot is coming up again soon, definitely my favourite conference (if you can call it that) of the year.

I'd fully recommend people going.