using my head

Well, at the January NetTuesday I managed to build a pretty decent-looking website live, in 33 minutes. The lovely Amy from NetSquared has uploaded some video of the presentation, and the videos of the actual website build will be coming soon, I’m told. But in the meantime, you can have a look at the slides from my presentation about how web apps have fundamentally changed the web design industry and web project lifecycles. Some linkies for you:

- Web design before web applications (video)
- Web design after web applications (video)
- View the presentation (slides)

I was really thrilled to see the Meetup attendees gave me a 5 out of 5 rating for the presentation, and I hope they will find the info and tips to be useful. It’s a lot to cover in an hour (both theory & practice), so the slides may be a very broad generalisation, but I do think the concept holds true: making websites today bears little resemblance to the way we used to build them even just a few years ago.

I think the really interesting thing to me is how I now tend to input content first, and do design second. This is completely the opposite of how we used to do things. But it’s a great tip when working with content management systems like WordPress or Squarespace, because it means you can create a design that you know will work with the type of content you have. So often we as designers would mock up something that looked beautiful with a couple of paragraphs of ‘lorem ipsum’, only to find that the design didn’t work so well with loads of text and several photos, which is what the client needed to have on the page. If you’re a designer, give it a try on your next project.

Next Tuesday I will be speaking about how you can create professional-looking websites quickly, at low cost and with high quality. Sounds impossible? Not anymore. The latest breed of web-based applications and tools have totally revolutionised the web industry, and next week I will be sharing my experience of working with these tools.

I will also do a live demo of Squarespace, showing just how easy and quickly you can put together a great little website. In fact, I am hoping to be able to create a full website within the 55minute session, so I’m setting myself a big target! If you are in London next Tuesday and want to see how it’s done, learn more about to the tools out there, hear my tips and pitfalls to avoid, then pop on over to NetSquared and sign up. Everyone is welcome so please do stop by!

What better way to make a fresh start in the new year than to freshen up my website. I have been so busy with clients that I haven’t had a chance to do it in a while, but I set aside the afternoon today and created a new Portfolio page to highlight some of my web design projects. Although design is not the only thing that I do, it’s one of the things I seem to be doing a lot of lately, and it’s nice to group everything all into one place. Creating the page made me realise that I designed, built and launched 12 websites in 2009, which averages out to around 1 per month. I reckon that’s pretty good going for a one-woman band, especially as I also had plenty of other non-design projects and photography work in the mix.

Funny how the changing of the calendar makes you take stock of life and reflect on how things are going. It’s good to have some kind of external force urging us to do so, because it’s not something us humans tend to do enough. I think it’s best summed up in the words of the immortal John Hughes, who sadly left us in 2009:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” - Ferris Beuller