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Brighton Digital Festival 2007

Jim Callender — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:33:41 +0000

Brighton Digital Festival has evolved and grown each year, reflecting the industry it represents. Now in its third year, the Festival will be split into 3 separate themes embodying all elements of this vibrant industry.

We are really excited as it looks like a lot of thought has gone into the line up this year. Browsing the events calendar and you will see friends and colleagues running some excellent events.

We have a Brighton Farm Hack day, lead by one of the founders Paul Silver. Good for honing those API skills you were too shy to ask about before perhaps.

We have a whole week of Brighton Skillswap, which involves people volunteering to train a small group of their peers in a subject that interests them. Recent talks have been computer development based, but this week should see the boundaries being pushed into the rest of Brighton’s community.

The “Â£5 app” meet-up for programmers, web developers and designers to discuss and showcase their “Â£5 apps”. This has been interesting in the past with entrepreneurs sharing their experiences and lessons from their projects. A good way to get feedback on any startup ideas you may have too!

There looks like there will be a record number of nominations for the Brighton and Hove Web awards 2007, good luck to all entrants!

The dSCAPE/07 annual Portfolio Clinic is an invaluable opportunity for digital media hopefuls to get advice from the region’s most successful companies, if you are starting out after graduating or need to know how to cut it as a designer, artist or developer come along.

The Girl Geeks are combining forces with Guy Geeks to bring one big Charity Christmas Dinner. ‘Full details will be announced ’soon it says, perhaps a good way to recap on what you have seen at the Digital Festival over a mince pie?

These events are always great to network at, put names to faces and share ideas.. finally, to come away with some new skill or technique you wouldn’t have thought of gaining.. Priceless!

Brighton is blessed by having such a grass roots, real-world community, there’s no excuse for staying indoors this winter, get involved!

How to boost the stickiness of your web site

Jim Callender — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:16:26 +0000

1. Professional-looking design will make the site more inviting and encourage the sense that you are a business they want to deal with.
2. Easy navigation will prevent visitors leaving the site due to not being able to locate the information they require. Ensure your calls-to-action are clearly seen.
3. Fast loading makes navigation even easier and avoids frustration.
4. Consistency of design and usability to ensure visitors feel comfortable as they go deeper into your site.
5. Effective searching mechanisms. If your site has one, makes sure it works quickly and efficiently.

6. Better organisation and layout of information. Text-heavy pages are daunting for visitors, so use overviews and bulleted lists for a quicker understanding of your product solutions and messages.
7. Improved cross referencing. Wide use of links between sections will encourage visitors to move across sections discovering relevant information applicable to them.
8. Current and topical news. To encourage people to return, the home page should highlight more of the topical and up-to-date news that is included on the site.
9. Show your benefits. Each page should highlight benefits to the visitor wherever possible – donâ€™t bury them withinlarge amounts of copy.
10. Review statistics. Review site stats to determine the most popular pages and top exit pages. These exit pages can then be amended to encourage the visitor to stay longer with improved layout and design and links to the popular sections.

IE7 standalone version

Jim Callender — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 19:44:34 +0000

Microsoft will be releasing or rather forcing us to upgrade IE7 soon
(as a windows update , so we all have to get used to using this browser.

Or at least testing our designs on it. As you can see around 60% of people use IE.

2006	IE7	IE6	IE5	Ffox	Moz	N7/8	O8/9
August	1.9%	55.1%	4.1%	26.4%	2.1%	0.4%	1.5%

Data from W3C schools.

Only thing is for testing, its always nice to have a few versions installed on a machine to test on. This cannot be done unless you have stand alone versions of the same browser, otherwise you will just have the latest version.

So found a good link to get IE7 working on PC’s and Macs:

http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone

CSS Management, bugs and IE7

Also we have to be aware that although IE7 is better than previous versions, it it still not bug free.

So its recommended as discusse back in June at @media06, its best to have the bugs to display your web sites correctly in a separate file to the main/global CSS.

For example:
@import url(“main.css”);
@import url(“ie.css”);

So you know your site works well in other browsers, and you have this bug.css file to cater for IE7. And hopefully when the bugs in IE get fixed you can easily take them out from the CSS file.

Have you tested your web site in IE7, does it display correctly?

Best Browser Testing Links

Jim Callender — Wed, 24 May 2006 23:33:22 +0000

Have you ever wondered what your site looks like in othe browsers?

Well, here’s your chance:

Just enter your URL (web address) into any of these web sites, and you get a image of how your web site looks in safari (macintosh) browsers, and also new and recent versions of windows browsers;