Darebin libraries website

Jun 13, 03:35 PM | Comment

Having experienced many online offerings from local governments and local councils in the past, as well as having worked for a few, I had pretty much resigned myself to accepting that most are going to be rubbish in terms of antiquated code using tables for layout and inline styles, bad interface design, little or no regard for usability or accessibility and, more often than not containing outdated content.

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.

Read more...

I Vote For Art

May 23, 01:31 PM | Comment [3]

I’m really pleased to announce the launch of my latest website – I vote for art. It’s a new online gallery, where you can buy and sell art, as well as vote for your favourites.

I vote for art website home page

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

Read more...

Judging the International Web Awards

May 20, 12:51 PM | Comment [3]

I’m delighted to announce that I have been asked to be one of the judges in this years’ International Web Marketing Association WebAwards web design competition.

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.

Read more...

Whereis products

May 15, 03:59 PM Comment

I’m pleased to announce that the ‘mini’ site I built for Whereis has gone live. Whereis products explains some of the new features at the recently launched new whereis.com, as well as explaining how you can make use of whereis’ maps across a range of products including mobile and in-car GPS devices.

I built the site from scratch in (x)HTML and CSS to be as standards-compliant and accessible as the design would allow.

Read more...

Google local business listing problems

May 8, 10:56 AM | Comment [2]

I recently set up a local business listing for myself in Google to both help my customers find me and improve the SEO of my site.

It works really well and if you do a search for “Web Designer Melbourne” up I pop.

Read more...

Work update

Mar 25, 12:18 PM | Comment [1]

I just realised it’s been a really long time since I updated the portfolio section of this site. Not without good reason though, and it’s not because I’ve been slacking off and enjoying the Melbourne sunshine (the chance would be a fine thing). It’s because most of the projects I’ve worked on of late have either been internal web applications (so not available for public consumption) or have not gone live yet. As such I don’t want to publish anything visual just at the minute, partly because I’m not really allowed to in some cases but also because I don’t want to spoil the launches for my clients.

That said, I’m enormously proud of some of the things I’ve been working on of late so I wanted to share some of the more notable pieces to give some insight on what I’ve been up to:

Read more...

Lessons learned from Gordon Ramsay

Mar 22, 03:29 PM | Comment [1]

I’ve been loving Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares series’ (the British ones were much better than the American ones – much less ‘reality TV’ shenanigans).

Each week Ramsay helps a struggling restaurant to turn things around, always with the same basic method of combining determination, attitude and drive with keeping things simple, manageable and meaningful to the customers.

Read more...

Looking for freelancers

Jan 18, 01:16 PM | Comment [1]

Things are getting pretty busy here at BTD so I’m on the look out for good freelancers to help me out.

If you’re a web designer, standards-aware front end developer, flash designer/action-scripter or have experience in working with textpattern and you’re looking for short-term freelance work on an ad-hoc basis, drop me a line at freelancework@tollady.com

Read more...

Art, Sensis and yet more Telstra web work!

Dec 10, 08:06 PM Comment

I know, I know… I’ve been a bit quiet of late on the old weblog front, but I’ve got a (feeble) excuse – I’ve been mega busy! – which is a bit unusual for the December/January silly season, but hey, I’m not complaining!

I can’t give too much away yet about what I’ve been working on ‘cause I’m sworn to secrecy and can’t ruin the impending launches, but watch this space for full details as they emerge…

Read more...

Side notes

My little sister
Heres a little one-pager I just built for my little sister.

Jakob Nielsen ponders OK–Cancel or Cancel–OK?
Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than sub-optimising an individual dialog box.

Flight of the conchords
This stuff is Absolute Genius

Web directions south - User experience conference
A full day conference here in Melbourne, focussing on concepts, technologies and techniques for building great user experiences on the web. Can't wait!

Redesigned BBC news site
The Beeb's 'refreshed' news site just went live. Read about what's changed on their editors blog site.