Following on from my earlier blog post about universities not teaching relevant web design skills, Opera and Yahoo apparently feel the same, and have come together to launch the Web Standards Curriculum.

It’s an entire standards-based web design course - free online to anyone, and covers HTML, CSS, Javascript and more. 

Well done to those concerned for taking the time to develop what is a great starting point for not only students (who can supplement their “formal” education, and teach themselves the right skills), but also teachers and businesses as well - able to use the resource to improve their current methods etc.  Let’s hope the universities and schools catch up quickly.

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I write this while stranded in the Glasgow Airport BMI Business Lounge, waitng with Martin and Paul for our flight to London (now delayed by 2 hours).  We’re going down to attend the Nominet Best Practice Challenge Awards, where NSDesign are shortlisted for the “Raising Industry Standards“. 

The awards themselves are essentially about making the internet a better more accessible place, and so it’s a great pleasure for us simply being shortlisted among other giants within the industry.  Accessibility has always been at the forefront of what we do at NSDesign, so to gain some recognition for this (and other initiatives we get involved in) is fantastic.

Talking of accessibility - the European Union has just published a public survey on accessiblity, which aims to gauge the current situation with regard accessible websites, the costs/efforts associated with building them, and the affects (and improvements) they give to disabled users.  The research will all be used to determine if a broader EU law on accessibility (rather than a country by country implementation of different laws) is a better approach to take than what we currently have.  Pretty interesting stuff, and I’d encourage everyone to complete it.  It’s just a shame their own survey doesn’t meet accessibility guidelines!

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Anybody watching Wimbledon last night can’t help but admire Andy Murray, and his epic performance against the French number 1 - it really was one of the superb comebacks of the sporting world.

With no “Home Nations” in the football this year (and even Martin’s Italy didn’t have the best campaign), it’s great to see Andy doing the Scot’s proud - lets face it - on the sporting front, we don’t often have much to cheer about (with the exception of me winning the EURO2008 office sweepstake)…  Plus, it gives us a great excuse to mention the website we did for Andy’s Main Sponsor - Highland Spring.

Go Wiild with Andy Murray is a competition “microsite” developed for Highland Spring giving users a chance to win a Nintendo Wii, as well as play tennis with Andy Murray himself…  Although based on last nights performance, best of luck to you!!

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I have to say that I am a proud and happy user of Firefox, I keep it open all the time while I’m at work developing web sites, at home I never betray it with other when surfing the net, and I never miss the occasion to advice a friend to download it and start to use it.

Today, after one year and a half from the last mayor version,  Firefox 3 has been released promising substantial improvements.

Memory Leak issue
Probably the most well known negative aspect of Firefox is that after a while that the browser is running, it starts using excessively memory, this is know as memory leak. Fortunately in this new release the way how Firefox manages the memory has been improved and now it’s noticeable a huge difference in terms of overall speed.

User interface
A lot of work has been also done to improve the user experience adding new functionalities. It is more easy to access the bookmarks thanks to a new system of star rating, tagging and search functionality. The address bar is now a lot more flexible allowing users to use it not only to type in URLs but also to search websites already visited or search for bookmarks. The zoom re-sizes all elements of a viewed website (not only the text as it was in previous versions) this improves user experience for those with particular accessibility needs as it renders, scaled up or down, pixel perfectly, all websites independently from how they are developed.

Offline web applications
Switching Firefox 3 to “work offline” it is possible to use web applications without connection, data will be saved on the computer to be later synchronized on the server once an Internet connection has been detected. This is a new way how to use web applications and it is still in process of standardization within HTML 5 specifications.

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When AJAX started to become popular, more and more people started to provide great usable websites improving the user experience, and even applications based on the web started to appear.   Javascript frameworks allow developers to create great applications providing them with complete libraries, unfortunately these frameworks are a quite heavy component of the website.  And here comes the news of today.

Google has just launched a new service, Google Ajax Libraries API, basically some of the main frameworks are hosted on Google servers and available with the intention to reduce the amount of data that the users browser has to download every time it is visiting a different website that uses an AJAX framework.

Clearly the advantages are not only for the users but also for those who own a website using this service, by saving the server bandwidth, offering visitors a faster website, and not having to worry about staying up to date with the framework updates.

The frameworks available at the moment are jQuery, prototype, script.aculo.us, MooTools and dojo.

Sometimes I ask myself what Google still hasn’t invented yet?

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Having recently interviewed a number of Graduates for a Web Development assistant position, my concerns over the formal teaching of web design in our Colleges and Universities have not exactly been alleviated.

While I’d fully expect to see some sort of “skills gap” between those candidates straight from university, and those with a little real-world experience, it is the size of that gap that continues to worry me.

I’d like to stress that all our recently graduated candidates were bright, intelligent and talented individuals, all with (or about to get) good degrees - they are not at fault - but I fear the institutions teaching them, and preparing them for a career in web design are letting them down.  

One or two actually hinted at being fully aware that what, and how they were taught was not “recent”, and that they knew they’d need to learn new skills immediately.  We had 1 guy interview who was entirely self taught, and said the only reason he did his university course was to get the bit of paper that  confirmed he could do it.  He then went on to say that he was actually worried that during the 3 years formal education he might actually “un-learn” all his good habits with the bad habits he was being shown.  By bad habits he was referring to things like table-based layouts, ignorance of semantic markup, and lack of standards or css.  All quite worrying stuff…

I recently did a lecture to the School of Computing and Creative Technologies within the University of Abertay, Dundee, to an audience of Computer Arts and Web Design Students.  At the time I was really encouraged by the enthusiasm and feedback from the lecture hall, which later spilled out into the café - the majority were genuinely interested, asked some great questions, and left me with a positive outlook on web design (and technology) education.  So clearly the passion is there, I just hope it’s backed up by the teaching of relevant skills. 

Personally - if I were a student considering my options for web design and development at University or College, I’d be damn keen to interview them - not the other way around.  Challenge their bold statements on their websites about “web standards” and “advanced web authoring” and get down to the detail about what you’re actually going to teach me.  Show me a <TABLE> and I’m gone.

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Microsoft presented the first public beta version of their new Internet Browser at the Mix’08 of Las Vegas: Internet Explorer 8.

Here at NSDesign we already started to give it a look and discovered many new interesting features. Apart from a few problems when opening up many tabs together, the browser seems to work pretty well, and the navigation interface, even with the addition of new functionalities, is simple to understand and doesn’t create so much confusion about how to use it.

Two functionalities that we found quite interesting are the crash recovery and the highlighting of the visited URL (to provide more security especially in the case of complex domain names that can trick the user).

These are not only the only new features, there are even more new features that developers can discover, in fact Microsoft, quite late (but never to late for something important like this), decided to pay more attention to the web standards making Explorer strictly standard compliant and other interesting features for developers.

Due to the fact that IE is the most used browser, this is a great news, in the future we are going to see more and more websites developed properly, providing completely accessible information contents. But not all good news come by their own, from another point of view a stricter browser can create some inconveniences to those people who own an old websites or those who have a website structured with not standard code, breaking their websites on the new browser. Explorer 8 offers versioning (backwards compatibility to make a website work like on older browsers versions, like Explorer 7, Explorer 6 and Explorer 5), it is an interesting functionality for a short term solution, but it doesn’t have to be considered a definitive solution to compatibility problems. The best way is always to use the correct standard codes, keeping separated content, structure and style.

Definitely the new Microsoft browser is optimum and can compete with other major ones like the new Firefox 3.

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It never continues to amaze me just how many (so called) web design companies I see offering a “5 page business website for just £295″ (or some other nice price plucked from thin air).

Are they serious?  Unfortunately - most of them probably are.

Long gone are the days when websites were sold by the page - promoting this now simply advertises the fact that as a web designer, you are building sites using old out of date methods with little concern for the client.

Most websites are designed around 1 fixed structure and layout - of course this may vary at times, and the design of the homepage may appear visually different, but essentially - every website follows (at least it should) a consistent design and layout.  So - design and code the “framework”, give the client access to a Content Management System (CMS), and allow them to create as many pages as they like.  Limiting them to 5 “static pages” (where the designer has actually spent 95% of their time designing ONE PAGE and 5% copying the code over the remaining 4) means when they need even just 1 or 2 exra pages, it’s back to the designer and more “per page” fees.  Even just to make a few simple edits (a change of text or some images) it’s often a case of more fees and waiting for the designer to get round to it.

We see so many clients here in the Glasgow office, who come in asking questions such as “how many pages do I get?”, and once we explain that webdesign no longer works like that - for most of them, it’s almost a lightbulb moment.   So while you may think that “5 pages are more than enough”, and “why should I pay more”, consider the future and the expansion possibilities for your site.  High Quality, Accessible, Business websites are still available for budget prices - our NSBuilder package proves that - just don’t get into a situation where you’re forking out ridiculous extra fees for an extra page or a 2 minute job to fix a spelling mistake.  If your current site doesn’t allow YOU to make these changes (at no cost other than the time it takes you) then perhaps time to think again.

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