It is said that undertakers (That is people who deal with the dead, not the WWE wrestler) have a recession proof job. People will always die and an undertaker will always be required to help deal with this.

This got me thinking, what other job is truly recession proof?

After a little thinking, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one other job title. Window’s technician. You see, Windows is prone to going wrong. Bugs, viruses, blue screens of death etc. Its unavoidable. As a result, for the world to keep moving, businesses and other Microsoft users will always have a need for those people who have the patience to troubleshoot Microsoft’s inadequacies on a daily basis.

Dig at Microsoft over.. I guess to some extent web design is also recession proof. There are 62 billion or so sites online. I would say that a chunk of them require professional assistance to update, keep running, redesign etc. The downside of web design is that people will not always need new websites. If a business is short on money, a new website typically isn’t the answer. Thus, with less new work coming in and a million web designers to choose from, typically many designers are susceptible to being affected by an economic down turn.

One last note, I was once told that hair dressing is recession proof. Looking at a few people in my area it has to be said that there is no way that their hair was done by a professional, more like mum with an electric razor. Thus I tend to disagree with this point.

Can anyone else think of any other truly recession proofed jobs?

I have a £30 AdWords voucher which I cannot use. Anyone want it?

When you enter this code into AdWords you will have £30 added to your account. Please read the terms below to make sure you can use it.

Code: 54P9-8SWJ-NWRP-TSHX-F

Terms:
Your AdWords account must be less than 14 days old
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Please leave a comment if you use it. Thanks

Recently I was called in to update a web application. This application needed fixing and brought up to 2009 web standards. I was told that this was programmed in early 2008 and to be honest I was very surprised by what I found. What I will do is take apart a file which I recently edited, I will point out what is wrong with it and show you the updated version at the end.

You can grab the source file here.

<div style="padding:30px" class="affmain1">

There are 2 issues with this code. Firstly the inline styling which will make this difficult style with a stylesheet. Secondly the class name has no meaning whatsoever. 

<div class="afferror">
	{if $message}
			 - {$message}
	{/if}
	</div>

I should add that this template file uses Smarty. The problem here is that again the class name is terrible. Secondly, the class really should be within the smarty tags. If there isn’t a message the div isn’t needed so there is no reason why it should always display whether there is a message or not.

<div style="width:400px;">

Another example of the previous developer just making it more difficult for themselves. I should add that all pages have this style tag. Why not set a class and allow customisation via the stylesheet?

<!--top-title begin-->	
	<div class="f2-top">
		<div  style="float:left"><img src="images/f2_t1.gif" border="0"></div>
		<div  style="float:right"><img src="images/f2_t2.gif" border="0"></div>
		<div class="f2-top-div"><strong>Add new site</strong></div>
	</div>	
<!--top-title end-->

Firstly… what useless comment tags! Secondly it contains far too much mark up. The image tags lack key attributes like dimensions and alt. This is the page title. It should contain a header tag. In this case I replaced all of the above code with a h2 tag.

<div class="div1">
			<div class="div2">
				<div class="div3-f2a">

Again, nonsense class names. What is ‘f2a’?

<div>http://<input type="text" name="site" id="site" class="affaccount" style="margin-left:3px"></div>

Why doesn’t this form element have a label? Inline styles, nonsense class name and an untitled div all need fixing here.

<img src="affiliate/images/cancel_sm.gif" style="margin-bottom:-8px; margin-left:2px" onclick="window.location.href='affiliate.php?action=sites&do=list';">
		<input type="image" src="affiliate/images/save.gif" style="margin-bottom:-8px; margin-left:5px" onclick="f1.submit();">

More inline styles.. but there are two things which bug me here. Firstly, instead of using an anchor tag to allow the user to leave the form. The developer thought it would be a fantastic idea to add some javascript to an image. This raises a question. What happens when users have javascript disabled? Furthermore, the fact that the image has no mouse-over effect will cause confusion. Finally people tabbing around the page on the keyboard won’t be able to cancel the form.. its stupid, short sighted programming.

The submit button also raises some questions. Why use javascript to submit the form when this is what the tag does anyway? Considering how these images are scattered around the application how does a designer style these elements? Are they expected to change them one at a time.

My client was charged a high fee for this POS programming. It is designers like this who give the rest of the industry a bad name. If you cannot program to a decent standard then don’t.. 

For those who are interested here is the before and after.

Before

<div style="padding:30px" class="affmain1">
 
<div class="afferror">
	{if $message}
			 - {$message}
	{/if}
	</div>	
 
	<form action="affiliate/savesites.php" method="post" onsubmit="return validateForm();" name="f1" id="f1">
 
<div style="width:400px;">	
 
	<!--top-title begin-->	
 
		<div class="f2-top">
			<div  style="float:left"><img src="images/f2_t1.gif" border="0"></div>
			<div  style="float:right"><img src="images/f2_t2.gif" border="0"></div>
			<div class="f2-top-div"><strong>Add new site</strong></div>
		</div>
 
	<!--top-title end-->
 
 
		<div class="div1">
			<div class="div2">
				<div class="div3-f2a">		
 
 
	<div>http://<input type="text" name="site" id="site" class="affaccount" style="margin-left:3px"></div>
	<div style="padding:20px">
		<img src="affiliate/images/cancel_sm.gif" style="margin-bottom:-8px; margin-left:2px" onclick="window.location.href='affiliate.php?action=sites&do=list';">
		<input type="image" src="affiliate/images/save.gif" style="margin-bottom:-8px; margin-left:5px" onclick="f1.submit();">
		<input type="hidden" name="changes" value="add">	
	</div>
 
	</div></div><div><img src="images/1.gif" border="0"></div></div>
	</div>
 
	</form>
</div>

After

<div id="add-site">
 
	<h2>Add new site</h2>
 
	{if $message}
		<div class="message">
			{$message}
		</div>	
	{/if}
 
	<form action="./savesites.php" method="post">		
 
		<div class="form-element">
			<label for="site">Site Name:</label>
			http://<input type="text" name="site" id="site" />
		</div>
		<a href="./affiliate.php?action=sites&do=list" class="cancel" title="Return to Menu"><span>Cancel</span></a>
		<input type="hidden" name="changes" value="add" />
                <input type="submit" name="save" value="Save" class="save" />		
 
	</form>
</div>

After a prolonged period of inactivity and offline-iness (not quite a word but ill rolll with it), I am back. 

Why was the site offline for a month?

1and1 got in touch to tell me that my hosting account was close to expiring, thus I decided to jump ship, I backed up all my sites and databases. Moved my domains and reuploaded everything, all in a single afternoon. At the end of the afternoon I had stanley web design back up and running but I simply had no time to get my blog up. Then as days passed and client work mounted I simply had no time. Days became weeks and weeks became a month.

Then today came and I had a few hours free. This time was put to good use setting up my blog.

What have you been up to?

Firstly, I got into twitter, you can take a peek at what I am to here. My Mac broke down (again) and was promptly repaired. This time everything was backed up via dropbox meaning that all I had to do was install drop box and sync up. The great thing about a computer breaking down is that when you get it back up again its all fresh and new. This time round I am actually doing hourly house keeping. Everything is so organised and well stacked, its just awesome really. We shall see how long I can keep this up.

My CMS for stanley web design is almost finished. The next stage in my CMS is to then port it to this site. Wordpress is great, however, I don’t really use many of its features and my CMS can do what I need it to. It also gives me a little more flexibility and allows me to further develop my CMS platform.

I am sure I did a lot of other things in the past month but meh… most are unrelated to the web which this blog is essentially about.

I will be back to my blogging ways from next week and you can expect some ‘proper’ posts being churned out soon.

This article talks about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2. This document, published by W3C, provides a list of criteria which we should be following to ensure that our websites are accessible to various user groups.

This article will get you thinking about how users interact with your website and how you can make it easier for them. This in turn allows you to gain a better understanding of what problems various user groups may encounter with your website.

Lets have a look at what the WCAG2 document contains and what it means for our websites.

WCAG2 is broken down into 4 sections.

1. Perceivable - Information and user interface(UI) components must be presented in a way users can understand.
2. Operable - Users must be able to operate your website
3. Understandable - Content and the user interface must be understandable
4. Robust - Content must be able to be interpreted by a wide range of user agents and assisted technologies.

Each section in WCAG 2 has a number of points. These are broken down below.

Perceivable

1) Provide text alternatives to non-text content

Ensure all non-text content has a proper textual description. User controls or input forms should have relevant names (i.e. name attributes). Captchas should have multiple ways to solve them to allow for various disabilities. (i.e. audio etc)

2) Providing alternatives for time based media

In a nutshell, audio should have a text alternative. Video with sound should have captions to allow the deaf to understand the content.

3) Create content that can be displayed in different ways without loss of meaning or structure.

Your content should able to be understood and interpreted by a variety of technologies. This in-turn allows assistive technologies to kick in and display your site differently. (i.e. a more basic layout, via audio etc)

4) Make it easier for users to see and hear content

Ensure your web site can be properly interpreted by visitors. Allow visitors to modify content. Ensure background audio doesn’t interfere with screen readers. This section should be broken down further.

• Color shouldn’t be used as a means to convey information. This to aid color blind visitors.
• There should be a means to disable background music which lasts for more than 3 seconds. Extended background audio can make it difficult for screen reader users.
• Provide enough contrast to allow visitors with ‘moderately low vision’ to be able to properly use your site.
• Allow text to be re-sized up to 200% without loss of content or functionality.
• If the same effect can be achieved with text, you should use text as opposed to images of text.

Operable

1) Make all functionality available from the keyboard

The key here is to allow your site to be properly navigated from the keyboard. You need to ensure that timings for specific keystrokes are not required. The second main part is to avoid keyboard traps. If you can tab or arrow into a component there should be a way to tab / arrow out of it. Failing this you should provide instruction on how to escape the trap with a keyboard.

2) Allow users enough time to read and assimilate content

Allow users proper time to read and use content. If there is a time limit set on some content then you should provide a method in which to extend, adjust or disable the time limit. You will fail this criteria if you have timed server redirects or scrolling text without a pause or restart function.

There should also be means to pause/stop/hide moving, blinking, scrolling, or auto-updating information. This is to avoid distracting users while on the web page.

3) Do not design content in ways known to cause seizures

Items shouldn’t flash more than 3 times a second and should be below the general flash and red flash thresholds.

4) Help users navigate, find content and determine where they are.

Page titles should properly describe the content. You should be able to skip directly to content where there are common blocks of text or images. I.e. if you have a large header or an application on every page. There should be a method to skip over it.

Another part of this section is to ensure that users navigate sequentially through your content. Ideally when tabbing through your page it should tab through to each element in turn. If you are using tabindex you may interrupt this flow, thus making it difficult for users to navigate through your content.

Finally, the purpose of a hyperlink should be able to be determined by the link text alone.

Understandable

1) Make text readable and understandable.

Language of page should be able to be programatically determined. To get a higher pass you can add further information such as a ‘lower secondary school’ reading level, add a way to expand abbreviations and define unusual words.

2) Make pages appear and operate in predictable ways.

Do not change the context of the page or create unpredictable responses to user interaction. Examples of this are pop ups when a page is loaded or a radio button is checked.

3) Help users avoid and correct error messages.

Error messages should be provided in text as opposed to other mediums. Labels or instructions should be used when a page requires user input. You can go further in this by providing relevant suggestions - if relevant - with an error. Furthermore you can add help text to relevant parts of the page, provide checking before submission as well as the ability to go back and make changes to multi-layered forms.

Robust

1) Parsing

In a word ‘validation’. Your pages should be properly formed, tags should be ended, their shouldn’t be duplicate attributes and ID’s should be unique (expect where specifications allow multiple identical ID’s).

2) The name and role of user interface components can be programatically identified

This means that assistive technologies should be able to work out the name and role of every link and UI component on your website.

Conformance and why it is important.

There are 3 levels of conformance. A, AA and AAA. If you are running a small site then should be aiming to hit an A ranking. If you are running a larger site or a site that targets disables users than going higher up the scale is very important.

The whole aim of the WCAG guidelines is to ensure that no matter what disability a person has, the person will be able to successfully access your websites content and use the website effectively. The advantage for you is that it opens up your web site to everyone. The advantage to the users is that they will be able to use your website faster and more productively.

Another advantage of implementing WCAG guidelines is that you will almost certainly improve the site for non-disabled users. Accessibility is for everyone. I am sure that everyone reading this has encountered a website with an impossible captcha, a bad navigation structure, a dead end or perhaps all three. Examining your website and comparing it to the guidelines can avoid this and can open you up to new markets you previously couldn’t reach.

I hope you have found this helpful.

Jason

Each year I make a set of resolutions. I set myself some goals and generally make a fresh start. I think it is very easy to get lost in what you are doing and taking some time at the start of each year to make sure you are still going in the right direction is a very worthwhile task.

While I have some personal resolutions I think I will stick to web design goals on this blog. My goals are all achievable and are split into primary and secondary goals. My primary goals are things I will mark my year against in 12 months time. Secondary goals are things that I would like to do and need to make sure I make time for them.

Primary Goals

Refocus Learning

In the second part of this year I spent a lot of time dipping in and out of software and languages, I lost my focus and started to slip into the ‘Jack of all trades’ territory. While there is nothing terribly wrong with this I would rather be a master of a few things than OK at everything.

As I result I will be focusing on Wordpress, theming and plugin development. I stop playing around with Joomla, phpBB, Vanilla and Drupal for now.

With languages I will focusing on my core set of skills. MySQL, PHP and JavaScript. I will stop playing with Ruby and Python.

Launch a New Website

While I am refocusing my learning, 2009 will see me diversify when it comes to sites I own. The goal for 2009 is to set up a secondary revenue stream. This will something which isn’t related to providing web design services. I am not entirely sure what this site will contain but I am sure that when I put my mind to it, what I come up will be brilliant!

Become more organised in my work.

Something I realised in the past month or so was that I spent a lot of time doing work that I could probably do quicker if I organised my time better. I have been making myself more availible to clients, the downside of this is unscheduled interuptions. As a result 2009 will see scheduling. Anything non-critical will be discussed at a scheduled time each week. E-Mails will be checked first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening.

Readjust client / personal project time.

I currently run several sites, all have something that could be be done them. In 2009 I will be looking to spend at least 10% of my time on personal projects.

Secondary Goals

Release some software

I have an app which has been 90% done for a very long time now… 2009 will see it completed and released.

Blog More

I am sitting on 12 draft posts which just need touching up a little. 2009 will see me posting weekly instead of monthly.

Take on more fun projects

At the close of 2008 all I had on my books was projects which you grind out. Bug fixing, bring a site up to date, moving a site off tables.. its not fun. 2009 will see me leaning more towards enjoyment than the paycheck.

There we go, my goals down and listed. Do you have any new resolutions? What do you plan to achieve in 2009?

With the year ending I thought it would be fit to post a round up of 2008. I will include some lessons learnt, some great software I have been using as well as a special mention for a community which I spend far to much time on.

Lessons Learnt

1) Back Up Stuff

This year I finally mastered backing up data, in January I created a modular file system to store project data. All data in my ’storage’ folder is backed up automatically online. This lesson was learnt after my Mac died on me in leading to the loss of lots of archived data.

2) Do not trust anyone with administrative permissions

In December this year an administrator on a community I run decided to ‘go native’ and wipe the website I had entrusted him with. The administrator only required one administrative function to do their job role but instead of creating a restricted administrator account I thought I would give him full access.

I still do not know why this happened, had known the guy for ages, we were getting along fine then one day the site is offline and err empty… strange. Whatever the reason, a lesson has been learnt. Give members the exact permissions they require to do what they need to do. Certainly no more.

3) iCal : Never forget anything again.

It turns out that my memory isn’t as good as I would like to think it is. With iCal a deadline will always appear weeks in advance, hospital appointments will always be kept and I will never be late for a meeting.

4) Keep Learning

With so many reliable sources of information about there isn’t a reason to stop learning new things. I subscribe to many RSS feeds. Most of them can be found on my netvibes account.

5) Beware instant messengers and music.

If you are speaking to clients via IM make sure that your status doesn’t show any music you are listening to. As a fan of Rock music there are many tracks with suspect titles, such titles really have no place as your instant messenger status

This years most used Software

1) Coda

If you own a Mac and build websites you must have a copy of Coda. Coda is brilliant, it is fast, it is functional and it makes web development easy. At only $99 you really cannot go wrong.

Get Coda Here

2) Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a Linux operating system packed with Freeware. With version 8.10 it just got much better. Networking is greatly improved and it runs like a dream. Until I get a MacBook, Ubuntu + Eclipse make a fantastic programming platform to work on.

Ubuntu Can be Found Here

3) Dropbox

Free online back up, cross platform compatible and you can get to your files via a web interface, just install it and go. It couldn’t be any easier. This is a must have for anyone with any valuable files on their computer.

Get Dropbox

Special Mention

The website which I have spent the most time on this year has to be The Web Squeeze. This web design and development forum is an endless source of information and advice. It has a great community that I have yet to find on any other similar site. As a result a special mention has to go out to the site founders and members who frequent the site and make it such a great community to be a part of.

Have a great New Year everyone.

Web design throws up a number of challenges with client interaction. Ideally the client would be able to come to your office or you would be able to go to them to discuss any new designs or various challenges with a project. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case. This can lead to a number of challenges explaining to or showing your client what they need to see.

I have recently been using a tool called Team Viewer to remotely control my computer. In doing this I have found some software with a huge number of uses in the web design field.

Team Viewer allows you to remotely control someone else’s computer and vice versa. It works on both the Mac and PC.

It is a small file and a minor installation. The whole thing is pretty much idiot proof. (Unless your running Vista, then you probably need to run it as an administrative user)

Design Approval

Getting a design approved can be very difficult, to ease this it is common practice to either send a design with a message or talk to the client over the phone if you cannot meet them in person. Team Viewer can be a great tool to aid this process.

Imagine this, you are on the phone and instead of imagining what the client is thinking or looking at. You will be able to visually see what they are doing. To demonstrate your point or to talk them through the design you can move their mouse around. You can point to parts of the design and tell them why each bit is there, what it is for and why this design is the best for their website.

When a client queries something you can see exactly what is being queried and address any concerns.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technology is forever improving, new programming methods, new technologies, new methods of working. What remains a constant is the existence of IE6. Despite being out of date, insecure, prone to pop-ups, vulnerable to phishing AND tabs do not exist… many people still use the 7 year old browser.

So many people in fact that they cannot be ignored.

Check out W3C usage stats.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Bear in mind that W3C is a technology website, it is a school teaching people how to develop websites. I would imagine that many people visiting this site are somewhat web savvy. The actual IE6 percentage is probably far higher.

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2008/November/browser.php

Depending on the type of site you are building I think it is safe to assume to that at least 20% of users are running IE6. Perhaps more worrying is if you look at the browser stats from w3schools. IE6 was released in 2001. It took until 2005 for IE5 to drop below 10%. It would appear that we will be designing for IE6 for many years to come.

As a web developer you cannot ignore 20% of your clients visitors. At the same time by supporting these visitors there is nothing to encourage the users to change. IE6 doesn’t support transparency, it doesn’t have complete CSS support. In short its a pain.

Microsoft seem to be completely unable to convert the remaining IE6 users to IE7. My main gripe is that IE7 always has been an optional update instead of a compulsory one. When Firefox 3 came out I kept my laptop running Firefox 2 for testing purposes. A little while later I was prompted to upgrade to Firefox 3. Excellent I thought. Why isn’t the same with Microsoft and IE7?

There are business users who are not yet able to upgrade or do not wish to upgrade due to the cost of the upgrade along with man hours lost while their users upgrade and adjust.

There are also the stubborn users who have the opinion of ‘if it isn’t broke why fix it’. They can browse the Internet on Internet Explorer 6. Why do they need to use Internet Explorer 7.

I think in the coming years we are going to reach a point where IE6 won’t be capable of running the latest applications without a serious amount of time devoted to it. At the end of the day graceful degradation will only go so far. When this happens site owners will have a choice between asking users to upgrade their browsers or shelling out extra money.

Recently I have been hearing a lot of developers talk about stopping support for IE6 for ‘moral’ or perhaps elitist reasons. The fact is though that the web developers job is to cater for a websites users. If these users decide to use Internet Explorer 6 then its the duty of the developer to work with it.

Perhaps a day will come when a message on a site saying “Dude, upgrade already” will become appropriate. However without a concerted effort amongst the major webplayers (google, yahoo, facebook, msn etc) there really is little point in smaller sites doing it. Unfortunately it isn’t their job to force the web to upgrade its software.

What are other peoples opinions on Internet Explorer 6? What % of the market share do you think you will be designing the site for? If you support Safari/Opera who have a less that 5% share of the market will you be supporting IE6 until it drops to 5% market share?

Where do I begin.

I write a generally favorable review about my hosting company and a few weeks later everything goes down the toilet.

My main issue was the unreliability of the servers. A second minor issue was that they had a faultly admin panel. I listed their main strength as support.

Let me fill you in on the troubles which I have had over the past few weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was installing Vanilla on my dev environment today and had a little bit of trouble. As the Vanilla community requires staff authentication ‘with no guarentee of being approved’ I thought that I would just post it here. The following post contains a description of the bug as well as how to fix it.

I believe this only effects databases with no passwords on them.

The Bug

The bug is that when you install vanilla on a database with no password, no password configuration variable is set. This means that when the database class attempts to connect to the database it can’t because it isn’t passing the empty password string.

Is this the bug affecting me?

If you have a database without a password, the installation has successfully added the tables to your database and you are getting a database connection error when you fire up the board then its probably this bug.

How to Fix it?

Open up Vanilla/conf/database.php

Add the following line.

$Configuration['DATABASE_PASSWORD'] = ”;

This will set the password configuration variable and everything will work perfectly.

Imagine this. You have been working since 7:30am. It is now 4pm, your slowing down and everything is distracting you. Soon you are bored, you have been working just a little too long without a break but you are so close to finishing that there is no point in stopping now.

This is where you notice something in your drink, just a fleck of paint. You are bored, suddenly this becomes of the utmost importance. You try to quickly swipe it out with your finger but you are creating a cushion of water between the finger and object and all your are doing is pushing it around the glass. So, you decide to get inventive. You notice a second glass to your right. If you pour the drink from one glass to another you will have one glass with your drink in it and another glass with a fleck of paint.

Its a fantastic idea. Suddenly you are interested, your spacial awareness becomes that of two hands and two glasses. You pour. Its working! There is a strange trickling sound but you are tired, bored and your brain just doesn’t work out what it is. You are almost done when you realise that you were doing this just above your keyboard. You then realise that the strange tricking sound was in fact water running down the glass and onto your keyboard.

You dry your keyboard… this will be fine. An hour later you have lost your enter button. You cannot make a new line with pressing return on your key pad! In your mind though you are not concerned, you know its only one key and you can map the return key to your spare alt button. It will only take a day or so to adjust.

You have a snack, sit back down at your keyboard only to find that the loss of the enter key was only a minor glitch. Now when you type your text is interspersed with random 0’s, 2’s and full stops. The keyboard is dead.

I have an iMac… Apple, the company who think that a computers design is improved if they do not have an eject or sound control buttons. Apparently the only place where I can get a new keyboard with these magic keys is an apple store. £29.. then I need a £10 cheapo keyboard to keep me going to the weekend.

Boredom today cost me £49… if thats not shooting myself in the foot I don’t know what is.

Once a year your car is taken in for an MOT. Its a minor thing, just a trained mechanic looking under the hood to make sure that everything is still operating correctly. Issues are identified and remedied. The car is safe to use. In today’s web environment where many sites store user information surely it is more important than ever that a similar system is created to monitor the health of a website.

As a result I have been thinking, its about time that a website MOT was introduced. This is for the following reasons.

1. Security
2. Helps inform other developers about the website
3. Allows site owners who know nothing about their websites have a means of translating information
4. Allows site owners to keep a website up to date.

I would like to begin this by talking about these 4 points in a little bit more detail.

Read the rest of this entry »

For 2 and a half years now I have had 2 websites hosted by 1and1. This is a review on my 1and1 experience.

1and1 are a really big hosting company, I was drawn to them when I knew nothing about anything. I had purchased 3 web design magazines. Each magazine had a 5 page hosting spread from 1and1. I thought that a company which was this big would be a great choice for a host. Thus the relationship began.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been using site5 web hosting for about 9 months now. I think it is about time that I gave a review based on their services and general performance. Please note the review contains only my general experience.

I choose Site5 for several reasons. First of all they offer many things that my other web host doesn’t offer.

• Unlimited Databases
• RoR support
• More Bandwidth and Storage space
• SSH access

The list above names but a few of the reasons. These compared with a good price was why I eventually chose them. This is my experience so far…

Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I decided to learn Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately the learning process was very much hit and miss. I had other projects on the go and it took me longer than it should have done to pick it up. Recently I have felt that I have a fair grasp of Rails. I am not able to code an application off the bat but with my notes and the documentation I can create a simple application without issue.

I have also been hearing good things about Django. As I am looking for a language to replace PHP as my main development language I felt it would be prudent for me to give both a go.

Thus today I started to learn Django which is written in Python. I sped through the beginner tutorial and was very impressed with the administration panel and the speed of development. I have since spent the rest of my day creating a blog. I am still a little way off completing it but it is getting there, I hope to have it done by the end of week.

Once it is completed I will post it up here with a step by step tutorial for anyone who is interested.

As far as picking up Django… Assuming you have a background in a programming language go for it. On a scale of 0-10 in difficulty I would give Django a 5. The difficulty is pretty low and its easy to get into. The only issue I find is that I am finding it pretty time consuming picking up something in a new language.

Anyway, check it out and expect more Django posts to follow.

http://www.djangoproject.com

So, you have a great idea for a project. Who can you trust to make this idea become a reality? What are the qualities that you should look for? What questions do you need to ask to make sure the developer in question is up to the job.

Developers Portfolio

If a developer doesn’t have a portfolio then do not even consider them. Developers without portfolio’s fall into one of 3 categories… inexperienced, lazy or unqualified. None of these ‘qualities’ make for a good developer. By trusting someone without a portfolio you are leaving yourself open to all sorts of problems.

If your developer does have a portfolio. Look at the quality of their work. If the work is below the standard you require then avoid them. If they haven’t produced the quality you require up to this date do not expect them to suddenly change for you. If a developer has a strong portfolio and is creating work to the quality required then investigate further.

Communication
Contact the developer you are interested in. Use the telephone and get a feel for the developer. If you have trouble contacting them look for someone else. If a developer is not picking up their phone or answering e-mails then what will happen if there is a problem with your project?

When you are speaking to the developer, do they explain things in a Lehman terms? It is not your job to know the latest trends and programming techniques. If a developer cannot explain various concepts, methods or ideas in ways that you can understand then you may run into problems down the line.

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Hello, my name is Jason. Everything is nearly ready to go!

The Web Development blog will begin releasing quality blog posts from the 15th September 2008.

Please check back soon.

Jason

UPDATE: My new house will not have the internet set up. As a result the first post proper will take place on the 18th September.