Archive for March, 2010

Something had been whizzing around in the back of my mind all weekend and on Monday morning I posted it on Twitter – Should web designers sit a fit to practice examination like other professions such as Law and Architecture?

Before we get started I think I need to clarify two points:

When I refer to a web designer I mean someone who deals with front-end code, not someone who sits in front of photoshop all day.
The examination should be a bar exam for entry level.

The reason that I stated a bar exam is because I believe that these exams should be for beginners covering basics like HTML and CSS. Whether you have further examinations for different levels is for another discussion.

Why Do I Think We Need This?

We’ve been pushing standards based web design for a while now and that’s great but the truth of the matter is that the majority of clients don’t particularly care whether you’ve lovingly built their site with carefully constructed code or if you’ve built their site with tables and font tags. The only thing they care about is that it functions like the brief and that it looks nice.

The above paragraph will no doubt be met with the usual response of "it’s our job to educate them" but I don’t know whether I believe in this. Do you want to know how the bridge you travel across everyday was built or how Subway sourced all the produce for your lunch?

I believe that the best approach would therefore be to make an opt-in examination, this way there is no pressue put upon the community but what trading web designer wouldn’t want to take an exam to prove that they know how to create a proper functioning website? Obviously some customers will still go for the person who offers a "full website" for £500 but then the client will have no excuse for what they end up with.

Opinions Please

I’ve outlined some of the thoughts that have been floating around my head but I wanted to keep it quite open as I didn’t want to alter anyones thinking. I’d love to read your suggestions or improvements on all of this and whether it is something you believe to be realistic or something that will sadly remain a pipe dream.

Project 52 relaunched

It looks like I’m a little late in discovering the news that project52, which I’m currently taking part in, has been relaunched. Incase you are unaware of what project52 actually is, it is a challenege that bloggers can take up where they will publish one blog post a week for a year.

Initially the challenge was to run from 1st of January 2010 – 1st January 2011. However, upon checking the website today I have discovered that the project has been restarted as of today, St. Patrick’s Day. It appears to me that they are looking for everyone to wipe the slate clean and start again.

However, I feel that this a little unfair on those of us who were more than ready for the start of the year and have so far managed to publish a blog post every week. I have therefore decided to take the decision that I will be continuing as I had originally planned and I will finish on the proposed date of 1st of January 2011.

If you’re interested in finding out more information then visit – http://project52.info/

Should designers have an online identity?

Earlier today we had a debate in the office as to whether you would employ a (web) designer who didn’t have an online identity. The room was completely split on the matter, so I decided to take the debate to twitter and I recieved a few interesting responses.

Mark McCorkell, Rick Nunn, Inayaili de Leon and Aaron Bassett were all planted in the no camp. With recordstyle, Nick Edwards, Cole Henley, Simon Davies and Michael Byers all stating they would judge purely on portfolio pieces.

I don’t believe that there is a right or wrong answer to this question but here is where I stand.

If you are a web designer then making sure that you have your domain name is a must. Whilst I understand that if you have a fairly common name like John Smith then being able to purchase your domain name will prove to be quite tricky but you should still be able to get an alternative like John Smith Designs.

I also understand that some people simply do not have the time to commit to things such as a blog or portfolio but this isn’t really what I was getting at in my original question. If you have a domain there’s nothing stopping you putting up a lifestream, buisness card website or your CV. We all know that creating these ideas don’t take too much time, so why do people still decide against doing so?

Would you really want to hire somebody who hasn’t bothered to do a quick site for themselves? I’m not saying that you have to constantly up date your website but putting something up that I’ve suggested above at least shows that you have a bit of gumption.

Building The Bookcase

Last month I happened upon a website that had a book section which reminded me of when I first launched my site. However during University my casual reading had to take a backseat and in one of my questionable decisions I decided to remove my booklist in favour of other services such as Readernaut.

For a few days after I visited the aforementioned site I could think about nothing else than bringing my bookshelf back to life and I have decided that it’s time to relaunch the bookshelf with all of the books I have found useful in learning web design and design in general.

Why have I brought it back?

It’s all well and good utilising other services such as Readernaut and Shelfari but I like to be able to have more control. Another reason I decided to bring it back is due to the amount of traffic that it used to generate, and the fact that I have now been able to get back into my reading since leaving Uni.

The bookshelfs appearance

Due to the sheer number of books that are on the page I’ve decided to incorporate a navigational filter that will only display books tagged under the category that you have clicked on the navigation. The sections in the navigation are; design, development, layout, motivational and typography.

Any questions?

If you need to ask any questions about the literature listed on my bookshelf then feel free to send me an email and I’ll be more than happy to get back to you. All I ask in return is that if you do decide to purchase the book, after asking for an opinion or whatever, you do so by clicking on the image of the book as they have all been linked up to my Amazon affiliate.

Go and have a look, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Delete WordPress Post Revisions

WordPress has a function called post revisions that will save a copy of a post or page every time you press the save draft button, this was introduced to help restore previous versions of posts/pages incase the user makes a mistake. As you can imagine, this can be very handy, one that I am sure we have all used before.

If you haven’t heard of this feature before then scroll down either a page or post, in the back-end, so long as you haven’t reordered any of the elements using the drag and drop feature, then post revisions should be five boxes below the content area.

I know I’m guilty of pressing the save button every couple of minutes due to the various computer crashes I’ve had throughout my life, so I know that I will have a lot of revisions for pages and posts. However, one thing that you may not know about this feature is the huge amount of information/duplicate content that it will add to your database. So how do you get rid of all these revisions?

There are several different ways you can tackle this:

Turn off post revisions

If you do not need this feature you can turn it off by adding the following code to your wp-config.php file define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false); however I wouldn’t really recommend this as it’s always good practice to have back-ups of your work.

Deleting older revisions

If your a dab hand within the confides of phpMyAdmin then you could execute this query DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;. This will delete all instances of revision from your database but please take a copy of your database before you go about doing something like this.

Use a plugin

One final option would be to install the WordPress revision control plugin which gives users more control over the revisions. The plugin allows the user to set a global setting for pages and posts where you can enable, disable and limit the number of revisions which are saved for each page and post.