We attended the The Future of Web Design in London on 30th April.

Our expectation was to gain some valuable insight into the possible directions that web design may be headed, but sadly the conference really disappointed on this and wasn’t worth the money we spent on this. We won’t be going next year.

With a few exceptions I thought the quality of speakers wasn’t great and was often more a retrospective look at people’s work rather than a considered, thought provoking view of what the future might look like (what we had hoped for).

The main thing that stood out for me was Robin Christopherson from Ability.net whose presentation on “Designing for All in a Web 2.0 World” highlighted what a terrible experience visually impaired people are getting online.

For people who want to produce outstanding websites but don’t know how.

We’ve been designing websites for small & medium businesses and large corporations for over 10 years now, in previous employment and for our own agency. Things have changed significantly from the first brochure sites we were commissioned to design pre the dotcom boom but one thing that remains constant is that many people we engage with find the whole process of designing and building a website difficult to understand.

Here are a few thoughts about some of the knowledge we’ve gathered on our journey that hopefully will help make web design and build a bit easier.

I came across an article in Design Week on 11th Dec 2008 regarding the new BSI draft standard on web design and accessibility. What was interesting was a reference to a microsite design for Save the Children which couldn’t be made completely accessible because “the client wanted a design that conveyed its message powerfully, rather than a completely accessible one”. And the Strategy Director at the agency responsible was also quoted saying how restrictive accessibility guidelines are from a design point of view.

Having had a look at the microsite what seems clear is that the one of the biggest problems with designing accessible websites are the agencies & designers working on these projects.

A conference was held this week in London about VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which I was fortunate enough to attend.

For those that don’t know VRM is concerned with all of us, our data and preferences and how we as individuals can manage this information to our benefit by controlling how other individuals, government and companies access it and what they are able to do with it. It is the opposite of CRM where our data is held by many different companies and organisations who often use this to send us stuff we don’t want. Or that’s my take on it anyway. Adriana Lukas has written a good introduction to VRM which is worth a read.

I think the aims of VRM are quite uplifting - Doc Searls (pictured above) said something like “VRM is to companies what Christmas is to children: they’ll be surprised” -  and in my mind it is as much about the opportunity for companies/ organisations as it is for individuals.

Today is a good day.

This blog hasn’t gone political but publishing this photograph which I took at a demonstration in San Francisco in 2002 against the build-up to the war in Iraq seems appropriate.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to create this banner which features some of the quotes Bush will long be remembered, for all of the wrong reasons. It might have taken another 6 years but at least from today we will effectively no longer have to suffer any further “Bushit”.

It is worth reading the Guardian where several American writers comment on their perception of “The state of America after Bush“.

Good luck Barrack Obama, the world has been waiting for you.

Lots has been written about whether the Internet is making us dumber or smarter.

Dumbing down society, wiping out history, old media is being forced to play by new media rules, the net is re-programming us, Google is like McDonalds, we’re losing the ability to read are just some of the charges levied at the Internet, Google, You Tube & Wikipedia…..

This is a really interesting subject so I thought it would be worth trying to pull together some of the posts i’ve come across. Hopefully this might help people make their own minds up, assuming you are able to read any of them in any detail

We’d just like to say a big thanks to the following blogs that were good enough to feature our work recently - SeptemberIndustry, The Serif, FormFiftyFive, The Cap’m, Dirty Mouse

For anyone who’s wondering what the point of this is, it give us the opportunity to get our work get in front of more people (who will hopefully like it) and importantly for us some really talented designers have been in touch offering their services (thanks to all that have sent in their portfolios).

I recently visited Seoul, South Korea and was a bit surprised to learn before traveling that UK mobile phones would not work in this country. As an owner of an iPhone 3G i thought that it was bound to work, however on searching the internet there are some conflicting views about this (for/ against) since the iPhone 3G is not on sale in this market.

My experience - the iPhone 3G worked absolutely fine. It picks up a network and can make calls and send SMS’s no problem. I did not turn on data roaming as i’m sure this is expensive, however, since Seoul (and also Cheongju to an extent) is full of free public WiFi the iPhone actually works better here than it does in London. So if you want to use it to email/ upload photos, browse the net etc it works like a dream….

We’ve been exploring the “blogosphere” for sometime now. There’s a load of stuff on it. And sifting through it can take a lot of time.

One thing that is consistently excellent is We heart stuff an online lifestyle magazine that seeks out what’s cool and delivers it straight to your RSS reader or inbox. As they say “We do the work so you don’t have to…”

There’s been lots written about how brands should use social media. We will be sharing some thoughts about that soon but one thing I do know is that any brand which thinks it has some cool stuff should send it over to We heart stuff and let them be the judge.

There are a huge number of online resources about the most effective way to design a website.

Research by Jacob Neilsen and Steve Krug into usability has undoubtedly influenced many of today’s web designers. A recent post by Smashing Magazine entitled “10 Principles Of Effective Web Design” suggests that the “usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a website”.

Usability principles are important but our experience would suggest that a website’s credibility is arguably more influential. The Web Credibility Project at Stanford University has published some useful information about how to boost a website’s credibility, all of which we would agree with.

Our experience though suggests that there is one thing above all others that is all important in ensuring a websites success…