On 17th May 2011 I spoke at Future of Web Design London on the subject of 10 Web Development Tips a Designer Should Know. Speaking at conferences is a fairly weird thing. While I’m happy to talk and write about the stuff I do for anyone who finds it interesting, I certainly don’t think I’m … Future of Web Design 2011
We put contact forms on websites quite a lot, and we check that the input data is valid and sanitized of all evilness, however after a few weeks the invariable contact form spam starts to filter in to the client’s inbox. To the client the obvious answer is a CAPTCHA. However I advise clients that … Stop turning contact form spam into a user problem
I try and avoid discussing things on Twitter given that forming a coherent argument in 140 characters or less is almost impossible, however I was engaged in a short discussion today with @TJRLZ who couldn’t understand why this site is based on WordPress when my company develops custom content management systems as one of our … If all you have is a hammer…
I read a lot of business writing and recently the term mumpreneur (mompreneur in the USA) seems to have become popular, increasingly being used to describe any female who manages the amazing feet of running a business having reproduced at some point in the past. I had a mini-rant about this on Twitter, and was … On “mumpreneurs” and other labels
Hot on the heels of the announcement of the demise of local Business Link advisory services comes StartUp Britain, a new initiative that boldly claims, StartUp Britain is designed to make it easier for new companies and innovations to flourish and encourage people who aspire to start new businesses to work for themselves. So, how … StartUp Britain – what do new businesses really need?
The oldest post on this blog is from April 16th, 2001 – archive.org has older articles going back to the 12th of February that year from my first proper blog, which ran on a very basic platform I wrote myself in Classic ASP. So I’ve been speaking my brains in this location for over ten … The Ideas of March
While writing a quick comment on Paul Boag’s recent post I thought that the issue of pricing online products, and specifically how we approached setting a price for Perch, might be of interest to anyone else considering how to charge for their work. Perch is a content management system developed and sold by my company, … Pricing your product
With the rise in inexpensive virtual private server (VPS) packages, the web is full of hosting companies making web designers and developers the enticing sounding offer of “becoming their own web host”. This is one of those things that sounds a really great idea until you start to unpack it. After all, who wouldn’t want … Reselling web hosting to clients
“The UI is not just an interface between the browser and a human, it’s an interface between a human and a database. You can’t have an interface unless you can connect to both things. If you don’t know how your interface connects to a database, what are you interfacing to? Ryan Singer – in an … Understanding your medium
One of our aims for Perch – the little CMS product developed by my company edgeofmyseat.com – is that the barrier to entry, to getting it installed is as low as possible. We chose PHP because hosting is cheap and plentiful, and it is very easy to set up a local development environment. Even for … Perch addon development and old PHP versions