using my head

This year Diamond Light Source (the UK’s rather fancy and very shiny synchrotron scientific facility) is exhibiting at The Royal Society’s Summer Science exhibition, and they decided they’d like a microsite to help educate people about the talks they will be giving at the exhibition, as well as keeping the dialogue going with visitors, reporting on each day’s highlights and showcasing photos taken at the show.

Because they wanted to be able to easily update the site remotely from the exhibition, and to allow scientists (not just web people) to be able to contribute without needing training, we opted for Squarespace as the platform for the site. The ability to upload a zip file of photos straight from the camera, and have the system automatically unzip and resize them all was a real plus.

I designed the site to match their exhibition stand, and also incorporated some Flash and interactive elements that help people understand more about what the heck a synchrotron is. Have a play around in the Machine section of the site yourself: it’s not quite the same as playing with a real particle accelerator, but it’s definitely a lot safer for us non-scientists!

We’ve also incorporated some audio interviews with the scientists who use the synchrotron and who will be at The Royal Society talking to visitors about their projects. There are some really interesting stories – my favourite is Joanna Collingwood’s study of metals in the brain, and their role in disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.

I certainly learned a lot on this project… and as a side effect became slightly addicted to playing with the particle accelerator interactives (my fave is the Vacuum). If you’d like to find out more, The Royal Society exhibition opens this Friday and runs until 4 July. Or visit the microsite now… and try not to get addicted like I did!

My latest website overhaul project is for Hackney’s youth charity, Off Centre. They are a lovely organisation which helps young people who live, work or study in Hackney deal with issues such as violence, depression, neglect, sexual health, family breakdown and all the other things that can have such a huge and lasting impact on people. I was really excited to be working with them on a new site, as they have a real opportunity to make a positive difference by using the online medium to reach and communicate with young people who need support.

Having just gone through a rebranding, they wanted a new website that reflected the new brand ID as well as the vibrancy and energy of Hackney, one that would appeal to their core audience of inner-city 13-25-year olds. The site had to feel like a place that young people could identify with, a place where they would feel welcome, and most importantly, a place that didn’t feel clinical or too far-removed from the environment where they live. We opted for an urban illustrative design, allowing the colours of the new brand to stand out. Because Hackney is such a culturally-diverse area, the illustrations also ensured that no specific race, age, social or ethnic background was depicted photographically, meaning anyone in their core audience could identify with the site.

Filled with helpful information, activities and explanations, I think the new site will be a rich resource for Hackney’s young people. I think it looks really amazing, if I do say so myself! It’s definitely one of the sites I’m most proud of, for many reasons.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, the site was built on the Squarespace platform once again, because it’s so easy for non-techies to use. We’ll also be plugging in a few 3rd party tools such as Eventbrite and Polldaddy to flesh out the functionality.

As it’s Friday, here’s a little chuckle to welcome in the weekend:

Remember the heady days of the 90s, when everyone suddenly jumped onto this new-fangled internet thing, and created multi-coloured, flashing, clashing web pages that would make your grandmother’s eyeballs fall out? Wish you could relive those days now? Well the good news is that you can! Mike Lacher at Wonder Tonic has created what he calls a ‘Geocities-izer’, which converts your shiny lovely website into something that looks like it was designed by a colourblind chimp on acid.

Here it is in all its multicoloured glory: Geocities-izer a-go-go!

(make sure your sound is turned up to experience the full audio-visual extravaganza!)

My latest client WordPress site may look clean & simple, but there’s a lot under the hood. Visual Seating is a new service which offers theatre-goers the ability to ‘test-drive’ seats before booking tickets. They can click on any seat in the theatre’s seating plan, and see a real photographic view of the stage from that seat.

My job was to build this functionality, so site visitors can see the service in action. You can have a go yourself on the online seating demo. It seems pretty straightforward, but getting WordPress to play nice was a little tricky. We got there in the end…

In addition to the demo, I also customised a WordPress theme to tie in with the client’s brand. I think the result looks great, and allows the images to speak for themselves.

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

Today marks the launch of my latest Squarespace website: a charity website for the Confectioner’s Benevolvent Fund (aka Sweet Charity). As they are a small UK charity, the challenge on this project was to create a great looking and functioning site on a tight budget, complete with multiple author/editor roles, embedded Flash and an event calendar. The fun part was using their brand name and industry in a creative way to form part of the design. The result of this is the bag of sweets that pours onto the pages, with different types and formations of sweets representing the different page contents conceptually. The client loves the concept so much that they will be using it on their offline marketing material, which makes us both happy.

We’ll be working together in 2010 incorporating the new look into their e-mail newsletters, and I will also be advising them on how they can use some of the latest gen online tools and web apps to streamline their internal workflow, allowing staff more time to focus on the important things: fundraising and helping people who need their assistance. It’s within organisations like Sweet Charity that I feel these web apps stand to make the biggest difference: they are free or low-cost, quick to implement and learn, and they can replace manual or time-consuming activities, usually without impacting on other internal technologies. In a busy charity, there’s never enough time to do things, so anything that can save time or make people’s jobs easier is a godsend. And there’s nothing I enjoy more than making people’s work lives a little nicer.

I have just finished customising a lovely clean, simple and easy-to-read WordPress theme for a new client, Capital Fire and Security. I like the clean lines and the way the blue and white make the photos really pop off the page. This project was another collaboration with the rather wonderful Katrina Dixon a.k.a. The Marketing Lady, who is a real pleasure to work with. Although this was primarily a design & build project for me, I thought I would help out the client with a few SEO tips during the training session. WordPress has a few good SEO features built-in (or via plugins), but the best SEO always boils down to content, content, content.

I think both the client and Katrina were pleased with the results, and I can already see that they are using the blog on their site well, filling it with really useful news articles relevant to their clients. So I can finally stop bugfixing and working around crazy IE6 hacks just in time for Christmas. Hooray!

Woohoo – how exciting. Those nice people over at Imagine Publishing have put together a nifty guide called the Blogger’s Handbook, which covers all the major blogging platforms, advice on setting up and designing blogs, and info about how to make blogging work for you. And yours truly is featured on page 114 in their feature on Squarespace.

It sure is nice to be recognised out of the millions of bloggers/designer-developers out there. And speaking of Squarespace, I have set up a showcase of my Squarespace projects, so hop on over to UsingMyHead on Squarespace if you fancy learning a bit more.