Web Design In Scotland Sucks | Part Two

Last week I published an article on the state of Scottish web design. The aforementioned article focused primarily on my experience of the state of web design in tertiary education. This article will focus more on several of the community aspects.

The State of Web Design

In previous articles I’ve touched on areas where I think subtle changes within the community would benefit everyone; designers, developers and end-users. Introducing required certification or web standards would definately be a welcome start and combat a major problem, non-semantic code.

Without getting into the technicalities of SEO I’ve done a quick Google search on Web Design Glasgow to see what non-web types would see. The results are a little frightening and there are at least three web sites on the first page of the search result that I have issues with. Now, there are several issues we could talk about here but for me, as I’ve mentioned above, the major sticking point is the masses of terrible front-end code scattered throughout these sites.

I’ve never been one for singling people out but for the purpose of this article I feel that I need to in order to get my point across. Some of the aforementioned sites are sporting such things as; being built entirely from tables, utilising a lot of inline css, using classes such as .style34 and not using the cascade. These, for me and I hope for many of you, are basics. Surely in 2010 we should be getting these types of things correct.

Web Events

This one is a major sticking point for me and one which I think could be the answer to a lot of our problems. I’m going to break this up into two section; meet-ups and conferences.

Meet-ups

About a year ago I was looking for local meet-ups and to my surprise I could only find three, one of which actually happened to take place in my old University once a month, ironically whilst I was studying for my honours degree I had absolutely no idea about it. This is something which I feel a lot of the local meet-ups suffer from, a lack of publicity. To me it seems like unless you are active in the community, the chances of you finding out about these events are next to none.

A year on, I’ve now heard about local events reaching into double figures, which only goes to further prove my point. We need to make these events more accessible and make sure that there is a steady stream of newbies coming through the door after each academic year has finished.

Web Conferences

Last November I attended a conference that changed everything, this conference was called Build. The reason it changed everything for me was because of the amount of similarities between Northern Ireland and Scotland. Both are small countries, both have no community representative, both have a few local meet-ups and both had no conference.

Build changed the way I thought about conferences, why should I have to travel to London or Brighton to see speakers and why do they never travel north of the border? Build allowed people, who worked within the web, to see some of the industries most respected people speak, people that they might never have got the chance to see.

Until recently, the only conference of note that Scotland had was The Highland Fling, which has fallen by the way-side. Scotland needs a way to keep educate web professionals. Scotland needs a conference.