Posted: Mon 22 September, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Own Business, Web Development, Work-related |
A quick self-reminder post : Interface Design guidelines.
More people should read this – it makes sense, despite being a bit geeky.
Posted: Wed 20 June, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: @Media2007, Geeky, Own Business, Reviews(ish), Thoughts, Web Development, Work-related |
I never did get round to finishing this, did I? Doh!
For the thoughts (such as they are) clicky on the ‘more’ link…
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Posted: Wed 11 April, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Getting Organised, Web Development |
One thing that constantly annoys/irritates/amazes me when it comes to websites and the like is the sheer number of businesses who only get the one domain name.
Currently, we’re looking at a particular manufacturer of wood-burning stoves, and trying to find a local dealer for them. First of all, the company has been (so far) utter crap in getting back to us, which is a bit of a worry.
Secondly – and bear in mind, they’re a UK company – they own the www.site.com domain, but not the www.site.co.uk one. Now OK, the .co.uk one is being hosted by a certain bunch of scumbag domain squatters, but I’d still consider either a) spending the money to get the domain, or b) going through the domain dispute system to say ‘Sedo are a bunch of scumbag domain squatters who’ve registered this domain in order to sell it’.
But because it’s a UK company, I naturally go to www.site.co.uk , rather than .com . This isn’t the only company with which this happens either – recently I’ve found a whole bundle of them. It’s incredibly annoying, and just goes to show how little some companies still understand about t’internet.
Posted: Wed 7 February, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Web Development, Work-related |
Note : This post is sickeningly immodest. Live with it
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Posted: Sat 3 February, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
Over the last three weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of work on a new site. The basic premise is that it needs to be very user-friendly, easy to use, quick, smooth, and useable. I’ve got my own ideas about a lot of this, and on the initial development work, I’ve been applying quite a few of them to what I’m doing.
One particular thing that drives me crackers when I’m using a website is – to use the example of on-line banking – when I have to go through a seperate page to ‘select an account’ when I’ve only got one account. To me, if that’s the case, I’d far rather that the system had some logic, and effectively figured out for itself (OK, was programmed to ‘realise’) that if I’ve only got one account, I don’t need to select that account, it’s fine to go straight through to the account details page.
Anyway, I’ve been working to a similar kind of idea on the site, and while in theory it’s simple, it actually turned out to be (in some ways) a real pain. Yes, the logic is also simple, it’s just that it does take a couple of extra steps in order to get it to work.
But when it does work, it’s really nice, and makes life a lot easier.
Why is it, though, that making things simple to use can be incredibly complex in the back-end, whereas making things really complex and obstructive is actually dead easy?
Posted: Tue 2 January, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Own Business, Web Development, Work-related |
Over the last few days, I’ve been writing a website for a small business that Herself is starting. It’s fairly cool, to be fair, and I’m pleased with the results so far.
One thing that’s been a complete pain in the arse, though, is that the business will initially be dealing with payments via PayPal – which is a good system, and works well in general – but man, is it a pain in the arse to get set up. Once I’m done, it’ll all work fine, I’m sure, and it’s been fun to write a shopping cart section for the site as well. Ah yes, the joys of eCommerce as well.
Anyway, it’s been interesting, and once it’s completed, I’m sure I’ll add some publicity somewhere, as well as sorting out the Google SEO stuff for it.
Posted: Tue 15 August, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Technology, Thinking About..., Thoughts, Travel, Web Development, Work-related |
Since getting the job offer a month ago, I’ve made a lot of changes in the way I work. Primarily for my own security (i.e. so the passwords and data for the other sites I work on aren’t readily available) I removed all my private work and data from the work PC, and instead stuck it on a USB stick. I also now have Portable Firefox and Portable OpenOffice.
What I don’t (currently) have on a portable stick is all the text editing stuff, photoshop, and that kind of thing. That doesn’t really matter, doesn’t really need to be portable. But the information itself is all now held on portable devices.
It’s been interesting working this way too – plus it means that effectively I can do my stuff on any old PC, wherever I am, and it won’t even affect the PCs settings.
I’m currently debating upgrading the USB sticks (At the moment I use two 512M Sticks, mainly because of a fuckup I made earlier in the year) to one or two 1Gb sticks, and at that point I can also put on portable XAMPP as a complete development environment (database, PHP, Apache web server, the lot) and portable NVU as a text editor, and then I’ve got everything I need for my work on one or two USB sticks. Of course, with a bit of rationalisation (and a bit of “dump the old crap on the portable 30Gb drive”) I could do it with the two current 512Mb sticks. One for the tools, one for the data. Hmmmm.
Anyway, I find this kind of thing interesting, because it does change the way I work. It makes me wonder about logical extrapolations, where you have a complete operating system on a USB stick/disk, and PCs go towards being dumb terminals that don’t have their own drives/storage at all. Instead, you carry your ‘computer’ around with you, and just slot it in (or connect up the USB cable) and bang, your own operating system wherever you are.