Follows web standards

This is important for a number of reasons. First of all it helps to ensure that your site is accessible to the largest number of users possible. This includes users with disabilities as well as search engines. Secondly, it helps to ensure that your site loads quickly and isn’t padded out with unnecessary code. And thirdly, it helps to ensure that your site is future proof and compatible in a variety of browser and different platforms. With new browsers and internet capable devices (such as the iPhone) coming out every couple of months, you don’t want to have to keep redoing your website every time a new technology comes out.

Uses CSS and not inline styles or table based layouts

CSS allows a developer to separate the design component of a page (for example colours and styles) from the actual content (i.e. the text). By doing this not only is the code cleaner, but it also means that changes to the visual appearance of your site can be done in minutes and are effective throughout every page in your site, instead of having to update each and every file to match. In regards to using tables for layout, not only does this breach web standards, but they also pad out the code of your website making it slower and harder for screen readers and search engines such as Google to read.

System can easily be upgraded as your business needs grow

There’s no point in getting a website developed that you have to redo from scratch 6 months later as your business needs change. Make sure that the system is flexible enough that new features and content can be added as required. This can save you thousands of dollars in the long run.

However when booting it up recently it got stuck on the loading screen and trying to force a shutdown or restart via the menu did nothing. As I had it set to automatically save the session, reopening the virtual machine just resulted in it opening up the frozen window.

Thanks to the kind folks at the local mac shop we managed to find a solution -

1. Open up the virtual machine
2. Select preferences from the VMware top menu
3. Set it to turn off the machine on shutdown (instead of suspend)
4. Shutdown VMware and open it up again

Hope this is helpful for anyone else who comes across the problem.

P.S. I think the reason that the machine froze in the first place was due to having an external hard drive or wireless modem plugged in when I booted up, to prevent it happening again I now unplug devices before booting up.

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’

and

No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock

To fix the problem, I added the following line to config/database.yml

socket: /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock

Huge thanks to http://soledadpenades.com/ who had the solution.

The fix thanks to doze on the modxcms forums:

Try changing lines 371 - 378 in maxigallery.php from:
Code:

to:
Code:

This worked for me without needing to do the other changes that he mentioned in the post, but if it doesn’t work for you, try checking out the rest of his comments.

Scenario: I wanted to put the current date and time as the default text for the date field in a form.

The code:

In the form I used:

<p> Date: <br /> <%= f.text_field :date, :value => @current_time %> </p>

And in the controller for the view put:

@current_time = Time.now.strftime(”%Y-%m-%d %H:%M”)

Formatting:

You can change the formatting of the date/time displayed, but I am using this for now as this way it puts it straight into MySQL without me having to rework it.

Additional info:

Refer to: http://au2.php.net/strftime for details on formatting dates using strftime

So how did it all start?

I have wanted to establish my own business for as long as I can remember. About 7 years ago, I was working in the retail industry and inspired by the thought of being able to obtain clothes at cost prices, thought it would be great to start my own fashion store. Three years later, I was halfway through studying business and information technology at Uni, when it occurred to me that the fashion industry wasn’t really for me, and that my real passion revolved around technology and computers. Towards the end of my degree, lured by the attractiveness and variety of websites and web applications, I decided to make the switch from desktop applications to the web industry.

After working for a year for a local web development company, I suddenly felt that I had the confidence and inspiration I needed to start my own business. It seemed like the perfect step forward, and I knew that until I did this, I would always be left wondering how it may have gone.

Who is Mojito Solutions, and what do I plan to do?

Mojito Solutions is a web design and development business which specialises in integrating technology, design and usability. Currently it is just me working about 4 days a week and some evenings, until things start to take off, which hopefully they will and then I am hoping to be able to employ a graphic designer (not my strongest point) and one day offer graduate programs and work experience and education to students.

Where to now?

Now I need to work on establishing a client base, so if you know anyone who is looking for a website, get them to send me an email at: info@mojitosolutions.com I am also working on establishing some business systems, and will also hopefully get some time to re-commence work on my GTD (Getting Things Done) application which had temporarily been placed on hold while I tried to manage running a business, studying everything I could, moving house and working fulltime.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and in a small effort to help make a difference I am helping to promote Breast Cancer Awareness by going pink. Also all funds raised via my Google AdWords will be donated to the National Breast Cancer Foundation here in Australia who are raising money to try and find a cure for breast cancer.

To find out more check out:

• PinkforOctober.org - Encouraging website administrators/designers to go pink for a month to promote awareness.
• National Breast Cancer Foundation of Australia - Support research into the prevention and cure of Breast Cancer
• Statistics from the National Breast Cancer Centre
• Breast Cancer Institute of Australia - Supporting research and clinical trials

There isn’t much of a web development industry in Townsville and even less of a community for information architecture specialists, so it was really good to get out and meet people with the same interests.

One of the key presentations that got everyone talking was Rashmi Sinha from SlideShare who talked about ten things that they learned by using agile design methods when developing SlideShare. Information Architecture usually requires a lot of research, planning and testing, however they took an entirely different approach and it appears to have worked well for them. I hadn’t previously heard of SlideShare, but put simply, they are an online sharing site for slideshow presentations. People can upload their PowerPoint presentations which can then be tagged and shared easily through the online medium.

Some of my other favourite presentations (in no particular order) included:

Designing sites people love – balancing emotion with business reality
Discussed the recent revamp of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Australian newspapers) websites including their reasoning for the new layout and changes in content focus. I visit smh.com.au everyday and didn’t really like the redesign when I first saw it, but it has since grown on me, and after seeing the presentation, I could understand why they have done what they have, and I think that it should be beneficial for users in the future.

Is length still an issue?
This was a well backed up presentation discussing whether it is still important for content to be ‘above the fold’. Was really nice to see a bit of the research that has been done, and in my opinion, length isn’t so much an issue anymore, with most users realising that they need to scroll to see the full extent of a page, but of course like most things this depends on the context of the page. If you are a news media website with a lot of content and articles, you need length to get all the information to your users. If you are a small business with a single product, you might be able to fit everything you need to say/show on one page. Overall good presentation, that was well backed up with research.

Analysing quantitative data
One of the most brain-intensive presentations of the whole weekend, but Steve has a very fun approach to keep users interested. At first I wasn’t really sure where he was going, and as I have previously done some studies regarding statistics, it wasn’t too much new information, and found myself drifting off a bit, but at the end it all came clear (and intriguing) and enticed me to want to learn more. Would have been nice to see a bit more as to what algorithms can be used in what situations etc, but I think I heard a rumour that Steve might be writing up a paper on this so I look forward to hearing more .

Love in an elevator – selling the value of IA to business
This was a fun presentation, with lots of pictures to help us all wake up from the after lunch slum. Now to convince my boss that information architecture is important…

Get out your pinking shears, it’s time to cut a few patterns
I had heard a bit about patterns, and worked with programming patterns in Java, but I hadn’t really done (or considered doing) patterns for design. This was a real eye opener for me. I have had the book Designing Interfaces: Patterns for effective iteration design on my Amazon wish list for quite some time, but hadn’t really considered it a priority book. But after hearing Sharon explain what patterns are and what they can do, I am very interested to learn more. Expect to hear some more about patterns in the future.

Exploring multidimensional tagging frameworks
As far as I am concerned tags are great. I expected to get a bit more out of this talk, but overall it was good to get an idea of where tags might be heading in the future.

Semantic analysis in IA
Interesting presentation showing how linguistics and semantics to make information machine-readable.

Ethical issues and information architecture
Any talk by Donna is going to be good, and this was no exception. Was good to see some insight to the way she works, and provide some generalistic guidelines for what we should and shouldn’t do.

Open your mind – map it
I don’t really use mind maps, I’m more of a lists kind of person, but it was interesting to see some of the cool stuff you can do with mind mapping software. Definitely made me want to try it out (especially the functionality to turn it into a report later).

What else did I get out of this weekend…?

• Met lots of new people with similar interest groups
• Learned a bit more about the Information Architecture industry in Australia
• Got to see the sights of Sydney and do a little bit of shopping
• All the walking around (and the early mornings) got me a bit more motivated to start jogging again… maybe tomorrow I shall start again, but we will see.
• Potential opportunities to move south to improve my experience and job opportunities. There appears to be quite a bit of work available down here, and it wasn’t as cold as I imagined it might be.
• Joined twitter

Further resources

Flickr photo pool
Official Oz-IA 2007 website

1. Limit your services
2. Find a role model
3. Don’t be flaky to your clients (stay dedicated, and follow through)
4. Document your success
   “the hard part is growing your business and making other people understand what is good about your business.”
5. Don’t trust your own brain – write things down or you’ll forget
6. Don’t let your clients follow up with you – you should five them updates before they get a chance
7. Don’t let your colleagues follow up with you – become reliable so that when they ask for something they know it will get done
8. Talk to people you don’t know
9. Always be teaching (tutorial marketing)
10. Beware of perfection – cost of perfection is high
11. Avoid free projects
12. Don’t waste money on stuff you don’t need
13. Don’t let yourself get ripped off. You shouldn’t get to a point where its done and you haven’t received any money – create contracts
14. Be firm with your clients
15. Don’t jump through hoops for clients especially for unpaid work upfront
16. Shape clients ideas so that they think they thought of it
17. Don’t bill by the hour, clients should be paying for you doing it right which is based on experience, qualifications etc.
18. Track your time
19. Honour your commitments and keep deadlines
20. Understand the physics of a project
21. Build your portfolio – don’t do work that you cant put in your portfolio
22. Use the right tools
23. Differentiate and find your own niche and be good at it
24. Set company principles
25. Be excited about your work
26. Be straight with your clients
27. Always do whats right
28. Plan for the future – think long and short term
29. Plan your work and work your plan
30. Customers should come second, employees and yourself should come first
31. Treat every dollar that you get from your business as an investment
32. Treat your clients like you love them. Don’t treat them like a number, figure out how you can make them successful because if they are successful you will be successful
33. Create solid contracts
34. If you work at it you will succeed
35. Take time to play to keep the creative juices flowing

I just found out that series two has just been released which is awesome seeing as though I thought it had been axed.

There are only 6 episodes per season which is a shame, but they are usually all quality episodes. Find our more at the official channel 4 site or do a search on YouTube.