The State of Irish Web Design

Making an effective website is tough. Without question. Be it for a large multinational business or just for a friend on the side, you pretty much want to achieve the same goal with every site you build – and that goal is to get your word across in a clear, cohesive manner. You want things to look nice, but most importantly you want their audience to understand what they’re overall message to them is. And from what I can tell, many Irish Web Design businesses fail in doing so.

One such company, whose name I will not mention, starts off by introducing their business and what they do by going into technical terms like “ASP.NET, AJAX, XML, XSLT, CSS”. They later go on to state that :

These technologies are combined to create vibrant site designs that are both user friendly and appealing to the eye but also highly functional for site users.

This is, in every respect, wrong. I have seen their work, and the sites they build do not fall into a “user-friendly” category nor are they “appealing to the eye”. While I don’t doubt the technical ability of this business, the fact that they try to trick their visitors into hiring them, with false claims of effectiveness, sickens me.

They divide their web design services into easily understandable packages. One for a basic website, another for an e-commerce type site, and finally one other for a real estate agent. To a prospective client, this sounds great, and I get that. But to me, what it sounds like is a 5 minute job for them, and a four figure sum for their client.

And it’s not just them. Web design, or to put it more correctly, good web design in Ireland for the most part,is missing. Web design is seen as an afterthought, something you look to get on the cheap, with no consideration for user behaviour, requirements, goals. And so you see a great deal of graphic design or print businesses tack on the fact that they do web design, made exclusively in Dreamweaver’s infamous “Design View” with the in-built “spry”‘s slowing your website down to a halt.

I’m not concluding that I would do much better than any of these businesses, but web design deserves to be thought about a bit more. Hiring a freelancer may take longer, but the benefits are great in the long run.  If the designer isn’t a total ass, he will be fair about pricing. You get a better site, more personalised, and more promising for your users. You’re in control of you’re own site, you can edit when and what content you want.

Ultimately, you can go down two paths when choosing someone to build your website. Someone cheap and fast, who will hand you the keys and never look back. Or someone who takes their time, charges that bit more, but presents you with a site that you absolutely adore. You cant have both, but you know which one is best.

College Update & Social Locality

So, third year is well and truly finished in TI, and I am now on my ludicrously long summer break. To emphasize how long it actually is, I’m not back until September. I have no idea what will occupy my time these next three and half months, but I should really get around to looking for stuff to do..

And so far I have been doing quite well. I noticed this site was in need of  a refresh, so I set about realigning it. Hopefully by making this iteration brighter, more readable (line-height & a nice font really is the key), and outlining exactly what I do, I think it can improve my visitors/clients ratio, but I guess only time can tell in that regard. I dont know if it was a mistake on my part, but the last design got me very few job opportunities. Perhaps that was for the best as I have literally been neck deep in college work until now.

Overall, third year has been quite different than the others during my time at TI. I think because of the nature of some of the modules, Exhibition & Team Project, we were definitely given more freedom, and to be honest, being left to our own devices was pretty enjoyable. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard work (far from it), but it was definitely a enlightening experience doing those 2 modules.

The Team Project we chose to do was a location-based social media aggregator, which we aptly called Social Locality. This application, which works on both desktop browsers and mobile devices, was created in the space of 12 weeks and with about a zillion lines of code. It lists the latest news, weather , tweets, flickr images on a specific county in Ireland. The project results aren’t in just yet, but I think we did reasonably well, and we got a good reaction from the people we’ve showed this to so far! Some of the other projects included a children’s website to help teach kids math, and a desktop application to help sort your movie collection. Both are very interesting ideas, and I hope they do well too.

The exhibition was something I had talked about before, but when I posted about it, it was pre-event. The 2011 Pen & Pixel Exhibition went remarkably well for us. We had extremely talented students showcasing their work on the walls of the college, and loads of visitors admiring the work. It was a bit surreal seeing this event actually happening, and it was down to our hard work that it went as successful as it had done. What I was most impressed by though, was the amount of work done behind the scenes. I cant count how many times students stayed at that college until closing time just to make sure the exhibition went well.

It’s almost a shame that its over, because it really was perhaps the highlight of college so far. All I can say further is good luck to the ingoing 3rd years organizing next years event. Its going to be a tough act to follow.

Pen & Pixel 2011 – Digital Media Exhibition

Hey, long time, no talk.. Sorry about neglecting my readers but I have been overworked & very much stressed  (but excited) with several college projects. One of the projects I’m a part of is organising the annual digital media exhibition. Each year the third years of the creative multimedia course are required to organise the event, which was previously called Digital Expression. This year however we have decided to rebrand it as “Pen and Pixel”, and we have a brand new web design to go along with it (which I created ).

The exhibition displays a range of media, such as photography, audio, video, animation, graphic design and text pieces. This year there have been some truly amazing submissions and I can’t wait to see them all displayed on the walls of our college on Thursday the 14th of April. If you’re nearby, we’d love if you could join us!

PRESS RELEASE

Tipperary Institute is holding its annual Digital Media Exhibition on its Clonmel campus. Renamed Pen & Pixel, the exhibition takes place on the 14th of April at 6.30pm and will run until May.

Each year the college hosts an exhibition showcasing the work of students on the Creative Multimedia course. The exhibition is organised by third year students.

This year the photography competition will be judged by Clonmel based photographer Wojciech Ryzinski. The exhibition will also showcase student work in mediums such as video, audio, animation and flash applications.

For more information you can check out the website –www.penandpixel.ie, or follow us on Twitter – @penandpixel2011. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Ping is mingin’

There was a lot of buzz and excitement after Apple unveiled their latest gadgets at the Special Event on September 1st, which unveiled a totally new line of iPods (excluding the iPod Classic), information about iOS, and Ping, Apple’s take on how music social network should act.

Ping is Apple’s first try of making a social network. To start using Ping, you must open and use it in Apple’s new (but not improved) iTunes 10. It emulates the Twitter follow/follower model with a few differences, namely you can decide if people can follow you or not. Your Ping profile is linked to your iTunes account, and you login using those credentials. This was obviously going to happen, as it gave the immediate access to over 160 million iTunes Store customers. Using Ping you can follow musicians, follow your friends, and you can like albums and songs. This all seems very good in theory, that is until you start using the platform.

When I first fired up iTunes 10, literally minutes after it finally was available to download, I logged into Ping straight away to test it. I then noticed a Facebook button, which was to add Friends that were on both platforms, so you can easily have all your Facebook friends, as friends on Ping. However the Facebook integration didnt work, and by the next morning it was gone. We have all become accustomed to  bad launches in the past month, notably Digg, but at least Digg is working on finding solutions. To add friends now on Ping, you must know their name, or their email address, making it incredibly difficult to find people. But again, that’s not half as bad as actually using it.

Another major gripe I have when using Ping is the fact that its requires using iTunes. While iTunes isnt as much of a resource hog as it once was, its still an extra application that needs to be run, and its still an extremely frustrating application to use. Sure, some might say that using a Twitter client is no different, but at least they work with the browser (at least Echofon does). As you know in iTunes there is no address bar and the back and forward buttons are cleverly hidden. You can copy links in iTunes, but its no match for a functional social network that work in the browser of your choice. The thing is though, Ping (and the iTunes store) is all browser based anyway, so it would not be too diffcult to enable browser-based access. This is another example of Apple’s control over us all. Whats next? The Apple store can only be accessed on iPads with 64gb storage and 3g??

Apple’s main reason for launcing Ping was obviously to drive sales in their own music store. Apple being Apple, they made a very conscious decision to force people to go back and forth through the iTunes Store and Ping. To like an album, you must be on the iTunes Store page of that album as is the case with songs. In a perfect world, that would not be the case, but Apple like money, and this is a fast way of making it.

Itunes 9 brought links to sharing on Twitter and Facebook, with hopes of integration with these social network to be better in iTunes 10. You can count on Apple to rule out any improvements in that area though, so sharing in iTunes is still as lame as ever.

In conclusion, Ping is a music social network for you and your friends – without the friends, a music social network to rate, like and share music – without the sharing, and a browser-based music social network, without the network..  or the browser. Something’s not right there, and I’m not the only one who thinks so …

Welcome

Yep, finally got my new design online and the comments are functional! I still have one or two links to add on the homepage, but it is 99.9999% complete.

The overall design is far from my my comfort zone. Usually I go for pixel perfect, very clean web design. Although I have experimented with grungy designs before this is the only time I was really happy with the result.

Words cannot describe how much Dribbble has influenced me in creating this. Having a constant stream of tremendously talented designers displaying what they are working on at the moment really got me thinking of the subtle details I could add to make this site look more presentable. On the flip side, I have edited some things over 50 times just to get things right.

Bold statements

What I’ve done on the homepage even surprised myself. I have abandoned the portfolio images altogether, and I’ve kept writing to a minimum. This is all new to me, and I dont know if it will work well , but I may as well try it before I scrap it.

League Gothic

Yes, this font is used in abundance throughout this theme. Its probably one of my favorite free fonts to use in my projects and I’m using font-face to embed it on my site. I could have used a javascript method like Cufón or Typekit, but I’ve found that  fonts behave better when being used normally. Oh and the added bonus of this being free was nice too.

Portfolio

My portfolio page has gotten a drastic overhaul with larger images. This has been missing from my designs for much too long, so I’m pleased with the outcome. I have quite a few projects still to add to that section so thats not quite there either.

Articles

Starting this project, I had considered going entirely sidebar-less in order to get the user to focus on the content in the articles directly. But then realising that the rate of which I post is about once a month, I thought that the content of this “blog” wasn’t all that important.

Overall I’m happy with this new layout. And although I’m bound to have the exactly opposite opinion in a few months, I thinks its a fairly accurate representation of where I’m at as a web designer.