During the evening we heard from four guest speakers about a variety of ‘webby’ subjects, including one that I gave about Responsive Web Design – a relatively new technique that I think is going to change they way we approach designing, developing and delivering web content across multiple devices in the future.

You can see the slides from my talk below, but I’m conscious they might not be entirely comprehensible out of the context of my presentation…

The other fantastic speakers on the night were Jussi, Ben and Sally who gave great talks on Wirify, ‘Injecting personality to interface designs’ and ‘connected experiences’ respectively. I know Jussi has put his slides online already but I’ll organise getting the others’ uploaded to the Melbourne Geek Night site soon too, when we change the content over to reflect the second event.

The Melbourne Geek Night idea came about as a ‘scratch your own itch’ thing, having spoken to a few fellow designers and developers around Melbourne who, like me were keen to get together for a social, skills-sharing event of sorts. Inspiration for the night came from hearing about a similar thing that runs in my home town of Oxford, UK, from a couple of friends over there. Thanks in particular to Matt and JP for tips and encouragement!

The plan is to continue running Melbourne Geek Night every couple of months. We’re currently working on organising the next one for mid/late November and already have a couple of speakers lined-up. The first event was quite UX heavy (probably due to company I keep), but that wasn’t particularly intentional. We’re anticipating a variety of subjects from now on about anything ‘webby’ really.

If you’re keen to get involved by speaking or have a particular subject you’d like to hear about, feel free to contact us with your ideas and feedback.

After the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and this summer’s looting in England, there is no longer any doubt about the speed with which large crowds can be mobilised on to the streets. As flash-mobbing morphs into flash-robbing, the attention of British authorities is turning to the mobile phones and social media that empower everything from benign groups dancing in railway stations to the vandalism of entire high streets.

Juliette Garside, The Observer, Sunday 21 August 2011. View full article

England has had riots before, but to my knowledge never so extensive or with the ability to spread so quickly. It’s clear that social messaging services were vital in helping the rioters rally supporters much more quickly than in previous disturbances, but while early reports suggested Twitter and Facebook played huge roles, it seems that it was actually BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) that was more useful to the perpetrators. Twitter and Facebook are usually very public social broadcast mechanisms, but BBM is much more covert, allowing users to send messages to many of their friends instantly for free and without being viewed by the general public.

In her article from The Observer, re-published in The Guardian on the weekend, Juliette Garside looks into the decisions policymakers are being forced to make regarding the extent to which authorities could be allowed to interfere with communication networks in the wake of the riots, ranging from simply closing-down networks to investigating more intelligent measures such as ‘Cell Congestion Monitoring’ (installed systems networks have to detect crowds, usually in order to manage capacity).

As news breaks that the three major social networks used during the riots have been called to the UK Home Office to discuss their roles and Facebook users begin to be arrested for inciting riots via the social media service, it’s going to be interesting to see what legislative decisions are made in the coming months.

Let’s not also forget in all this, that it’s the power of these services, particularly Twitter and Facebook that was so useful in garnering support for the clean up effort in the days following the riots too, highlighting the real strength of these services for positive effect in times of need.

Regardless of the exact services used, it’s an interesting subject and something made possible only by the availability of new technologies. Upon hearing news of the events earlier this year I was immediately reminded of the talk given at ignite 2 in London last year; “Flash Mob Gone Wrong” by Tom Scott. While not exactly the same, it’s still quite scary…

The Age website search field causes me to pause for a second every time I use it. It’s not a huge issue and the system works perfectly satisfactorily (the search results could do with some fine-tuning, but that’s another story) but for some reason the design of the search text-entry field defies convention and bears more of a resemblance to a ‘raised’ drop-down style form component than the usual ‘recessed’ text field. This, coupled with the fact that the button is joined to the text field, doesn’t look like any other buttons across the site and is all placed below the main navigation always seems to catch me out and make me have to think for a second before proceeding.

Instead, I’d suggest The Age redesign their search field to look ‘recessed’, in alignment with the current convention for text fields. Leaving the standard formatting would be preferred, but if they really had to override this with an image, at least make it look similar and not like form elements with different functionality. In addition I’d recommend they move the button a little further to the right so that it does not appear to be a single element.

The existing Age search field is ‘raised’, and bears more of a resemblance to a drop-down style form component than the usual ‘recessed’ text field.

Interestingly, this approach has been taken for the search results page, making it much more usable (I’d probably drop the ‘Search here…’ text though, as the label to the left makes it somewhat redundant):

Search fields within the search results pages are left un-styled and are much more usable as a result.

Finally, I’d move the search field to the top-right of the page in a similar fashion to The Guardian site, again following common convention and making it much easier to find.

Andrew and I decided to join forces in order to offer a more complete end-to-end service to our clients, with me heading-up the strategy, IA, design and user-experience side and Andrew taking care of the back-end code and CMS development (but we both do a bit of everything in reality).

Check out the new  Thirst Studios site and let me know what you think.

The site launched this week and has already had a phenomenal response, with a rush of dream job hopefuls causing the site to crash in just two days of it’s release.

Besides looking great with a nice design, great imagery and smooth flash work there’s a lot going on ‘under the hood’. This is easily the biggest site I have worked on in terms of ‘whistles and bells’. It makes use of over 30 scripts, libraries, frameworks, plugins and API’s, and just how the team enabled all of these to work in harmony across the site whilst still adhering to web standards is really quite an achievement!

Hats off to Matt, Horia, Glen, Anton and Mark. Great work, guys.

In their own words:

SpicyWebDesigners.com features some of the hottest web design talent around the world and strives to showcase them and inspire others with what is possible in the world of web design.

It’s really nice to have been considered worthy of a listing amongst other great designers such as Chris Dawson and Elliot Jay Stocks!

Here are my answers to Luc’s questions.

So what is it? Well, the idea is this: Rather than structuring your HTML in the usual order of header/navigation, content and footer, you build the pages such that the main content appears first, with the navigation and footer underneath. Then, using CSS to style the page you pull the navigation/header back up to appear above the content when viewed in a browser.

The articles I found describing the technique promote the idea that doing this will raise the relevance of your page within search engine rankings since it’s believed that some spiders only read the first few characters, or give more weight to content appearing towards the top of a page. You can see the articles here:

• Tech republic’s ‘Rearrange page code to raise text relevance‘ article.
• Brook group’s ‘Putting Content First: SEO and Advanced CSS‘ article.

It does seems to make sense, but does anyone know of any evidence to support this?

While this is all very interesting from a SEO point of view, what interested me more was the idea that this method of marking-up a page could actually aid usability and accessibility for those using assistive technologies like screen readers, or people with old mobiles or PDA’s that can’t handle CSS very well. Traditionally we responsible web designers have added things like ‘skip to content’ links within our HTML markup to help such users, but this negates that need since upon arriving at a page coded like this, the user is presented with the article title and the article immediately without the need to skip past the logo, navigation etc. The flip-side of course is that they would require a ‘skip to navigation’ should they want to navigate away from the page quickly.

There is another argument I can think of against this method and that’s down to good usability through consistency. By this I mean most, if not all pages are currently marked-up in the traditional way that I mentioned before: header/navigation at the top, then content and then the footer. As a result, most people visiting websites using assistive technologies will be familiar with the current structure, expecting to find the header information and main navigation at the top of the page and used to the idea that they need to skip past this to reach the content. As such, re-arranging the HTML as these articles suggest could actually do more harm than good as it’s an unconventional approach and inconsistent with most other sites.

Have any of you ever actually implemented this technique anywhere? Does it work? What are your thoughts?

Whatever the reasons for this, be it that the website is perhaps considered a low priority, that there’s no dedicated resource allocated to the website or that it’s simply too hard to get people to agree to a redesign, the sites’ users seem destined to lose-out.

This has always amazed and concerned me considering the broad, diverse user base that these organisations must have, and the importance of the content to a lot of people.

I was pleasantly surprised therefore, by the Darebin libraries website that I discovered this week. Not only is the site nicely designed with a simple, clean interface, but it’s nicely coded too, with semantic (x)HTML, clean CSS and carefully implemented javaScript that helps maintain good accessibility through the use of graceful degradation techniques, otherwise known as progressive enhancement.

Good work Darebin libraries.

I vote for art website home page

Based in Melbourne, Australia the site showcases some fantastic contemporary work by local and international artists.

I vote for art website art detail page

Thanks again to the wonderful Andrew Gunstone for assistance with the back-end programming and checkout functionality. Andrew, you’re a legend!

So get on over to I vote for art and get yourselves something cool to decorate those walls with!

Now in its 12th year, the WebAwards is the premier annual website award competition that names the best Web sites in 96 industries while setting the standard of excellence for all website development.

It’s an honor to have been called upon to contribute to the judging of the competition this year. Stay tuned for the results!

Oh, and entries are still open so why not submit a site or two?