When you are designing a shop, whether online or in the real world, one of the most important design criteria is that you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find the products that they want to buy. One of the best counter-examples for this is the London bookshop, Foyles.… Continue reading Online Shopping
Category: web
Web 2.0 Not Always Good
Yesterday’s little spat about the BBC’s weather data neatly illustrates a potential problem with the Web 2.0 “everything is an API” approach. To summarise what happened yesterday… For some months the BBC have been promising that weather feeds would be available from their Backstage project. But they’ve been involved in protracted licensing negotiations with the… Continue reading Web 2.0 Not Always Good
Planet Westminster
I’m going planet crazy here. And Plagger means I can build a new planet in about five minutes. And most of that time is spent working out which feeds to include. Anyway, the latest one is Planet Westminster which aggregates all of the MPs’ blogs that I can find. If you know of any that… Continue reading Planet Westminster
Odeon Redesign
I’ve just noticed that the Odeon web site has had a major redesign and now appears to work without any problems in Firefox. When did that happen?
BBC and Web 2.0
The BBC have plans to make their web site more “Web 2.0” over the next few years. The recent Reboot competition was part of this initiative. Now, they’re trying to pin down exactly what they mean by “Web 2.0”. In order to help with this, they’ve started a discussion on the Backstage mailing list. There… Continue reading BBC and Web 2.0
Searching Online Newpapers
Over the last couple of weeks, Martin Belam has been reviewing the search functionality on UK newpaper web sites. He has now published his conclusions. The article also links to detailed individual entries on each paper surveyed. Some of his findings are quite surprising. Papers who aren’t seen as particularly web-savvy did well in some… Continue reading Searching Online Newpapers
CSS Errors
More and more people are designing their web sites using CSS. And that’s obviously a good thing. If you don’t know why that’s a good thing and you’re designing a web site then I suggest you quickly buy and read a copy of Designing with Web Standards[1]. But the problem is that many people don’t… Continue reading CSS Errors
Spoilers
I’m not as bothered by spoilers as many people that I know. I don’t turn over quickly to avoid the “coming next week” clips at the end of TV programmes. But I do think that the Doctor Who spoilers that have been all over my usual newsfeeds this morning are taking things a bit too… Continue reading Spoilers
Flickr Spam
I got my first Flickr spam today. It was some religious nutter telling me all about their imaginary friend. The account that it came from has no photos, no contacts and no information in the profile. I’ve blocked the user, but I know they’ll just create new accounts. I really hope that Flickr stamp on… Continue reading Flickr Spam
Girls with Guitars (and Broken Web Sites)
(This entry is mostly about technical standards on the web – not, as it might seem at first, my dubious musical taste) I’m a sucker for a pretty girl with a jangly guitar. And we all know that I’m a geek. So I was interested in the idea of Sandi Thom who supposedly[1] got her… Continue reading Girls with Guitars (and Broken Web Sites)