June 14: One of my regulars calls and asks me just to “put up an under construction notice” and re-do their site.

June 17: One of my other regulars emails to let me know they’re flying someone in to ‘revisit’ their site.

June 18: I ask for an extra week of vacation from my full time day job and consider raising my hourly rate.

As part of the Technology Enabled Knowledge (TEK) initiative at BCIT Danny Catt, one of the faculty, was sponsored to take a trip around South America and Antarctica studying local research and responses to sustainability and environmental issues. Throughout the journey he used blogging, digital photography, virtual lecture software, shared file storage space, and of course e-mail to keep in touch which his students and communicate with the world.

Terry Fuller, the instructional development coordinator that was helping Danny with the project submitted a paper to CADE to talk about “Using the Internet to make Meaningful Global Connections in the Classroom.”  I was involved in creating the web page and blog that was the highlight of the project and Terry asked me to talk about the “technical” side of designing the website.

Rather than boring the crowd with PHP, HTML, CSS, CMS and other TLAs. I talked about the rest of the stuff that goes into the design process: user needs, site objectives, functional specifications, content requirements, information architecture, navigation design, visual design, and all that good stuff but for those of you who care the site was driven by Drupal and included a XML driven flash photo gallery, a Google map mashup, and some video and audio recordings, though not as many as we’d hoped – apparently it’s tough to upload media files from the middle of the Amazon – who knew?

The project was a lot of fun and very different my usual daily duties. I’ll post a summary and the slides soon.

Blog posts I hope to make in the next two weeks:

• Taking credit where credit is due – in response to a discussion about women in IT at zeldman.com.
• My thoughts on the hiring process and the job market and why I do what I do where I do for the pay I get.
• Some of the steps we’re taking to convert our templates from tables within tables within tables to just… one table, well it’s an improvement.
• Highlights of our presentation at CADE and my thoughts on the rest of the conference.

Until then, if you think of yourself as a web designer – go take A List Apart’s Web Designer survey.

Forty percent of our job is providing encouragement.  “Don’t worry, it won’t go up on the website until we release it so you can play around all you want.” “We can always undo the changes if you think you’ve made a mistake.”  I get my best compliments from these kinds of support calls.

This morning on of our clients told me, “You’ve made me feel so much better about all this now, I’m so glad you called.  What a great way to start a Monday.”

What a great way to start a Monday :)

When the network goes down the whole department starts acting like school kids when the power goes out.  We sit around waiting for the power to come back on or the teachers to tell us to go home and the longer it’s out the more trouble we contemplate causing ;)

Well, I get my wish. We’re going to take some baby steps towards semantic HTML and CSS (POSH if you like) and despite my aversion to being in charge, I’m leading the project.

As a first step I’m trying to write a CSS coding style guide. I can’t necessarily clean up the current mess but I can try to stop any new ones from being made ;)

What I want to do is develop guidelines for:

• if and how style definitions should be divided between multiple style sheets
• what order style definitions should be listed in (I currently put all my tag definitions at the top of documents and then place my id and class definitions beneath them in the order they’re anticipated to appear on the page)
• naming conventions for ids and classes
• commenting conventions
• what order properties should be arranged within definitions
• if and when we should use shorthand properties
• formatting guidelines

So far my research has turned up very few examples to help me with the development. This somewhat out dated post is the best I’ve found so far. Part of my problem is that searching for a style guide for CSS is just coming up with guides to styling with CSS.

Do you work with a CSS coding style guide or know any good resources for developing one?

Web Directions North is an international conference for people who work with the web, from project managers to web programmers to web designers. This year it was hosted in Vancouver and a few of us jumped at the opportunity to go and were grateful to have the department’s support.

The conference covered a good balance of theoretical big thinking ideas and practical hands on code ideas and we were fortunate to come home with both things to work towards in the long run and ideas that could be implemented immediately.

These are a few of the “big picture” ideas that stood out to us:

• User Experience – It’s the difference between making a website as popular as the SunDisk Sansa MP3 player and making a website as popular as the iPod. Many of the speakers talked about the ways they integrate user experience design and testing into their work early in the project process and what a huge positive impact it has had on their websites.
• Web Standards – All the presenters were strong advocates of web standards. They also argued against the idea that all a website needs to meet standards is to be well coded. In their eyes a website with standards has high standards – it should also be accessible, backwards compatible, built using the principles of progressive enhancement, semantic, and have good user experience.
• Ajax – There was a lot of discussion about Ajax, what it is, why it has become popular, and where and how to best use it. It was advocated that sites should be built to function perfectly without Ajax and Ajax can be added after to enhance user experience. There were also some user experience issues identified with using Ajax and some solutions proposed.

These ideas touch on difference skill sets and the presenters who talked about project management felt that the ideal web team would consist of a mix of individuals with skills that cross the disciplines of development, design, usability, and content. This structure keeps the team nimble, and promotes rapid prototyping for continuous improvement.

It’s rare that a conference provides information you can act on the next day when you sit back down at you desk but these are ideas we found immediately useful:

• Microformats – Microformats are a standardized way to add CSS to XHTML to code standardized information such as addresses and events so that programs such as address books and calendars can import them with a single click if you have a newer browser or the right plugins. The contacts application (bcit.ca/contacts) has been rewritten to use microformats and the new version launched March 6^th!
• Mashups – A mashup is when part of a website is integrated into another website. You might have seen a Google Maps mashup like this one: http://blogs.bcit.ca/catttrax2/journey/route. One of the sessions covered what’s involved in beginning a mashup and now a campus map mashup is on the way!
• Progressive Enhancement – This is a “big idea” about how to code and a shift from the old concept of “graceful degradation”. The suggestion is that content should be written first and then semantic code, presentation, and behavior should be added on top of it in layers so that the core content is still accessible and intelligible if it is accessed without the presentation and behavior layers. The contacts application was rewritten using the principles of progressive enhancement; check it out with JavaScript or CSS turned off!

If you’re interested in learning more about any of these ideas the presentation summaries and notes are available on the Web Directions North website or you can talk to Brandon, Alan or me :)

• making my Mum a website
• moving hosting servers for digitalphoenix.ca
• learning cgi so I can create an auto generated thank you message for HOPE’s donors
• taking Mandarin (what was I thinking?)