blog

Future of Web Design, London 2009

The ever popular Future of Web Design conference returns to London in 2009, and we’re pleased to announce that Drew will be running a half-day workshop on Easing the path from design to development.

24 Ways returns for another year

24 Ways – the Advent Calendar for web geeks – returns for another 24 days of web tips, tutorials and techniques. Each day we will be publishing an article by a different author on subjects ranging from web development, design, project management and the business of working on the web.

Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong

Rachel Andrew’s latest book – co-authored with Kevin Yank – is now available on Sitepoint, and should be available on Amazon later this month (and in all good bookstores).

Summer Project

This summer we have Ed Kelly from Exeter University working at edgeofmyseat.com. Ed is studying Computer Science and will be working with us for 8 weeks as part of the Shell Step Programme. The programme aims to get students working in business on a real project during their summer break.

8 Features to look for when choosing a CMS

At this year’s @media conference in London, I presented on the subject of Content Management Without the Killing. The slides alone don’t tell the full story, so I am aiming to serialise some of the main themes as articles here. This is the first such article, and focuses on the features you should look for when choosing a content management system.

edgeofmyseat.com news - April 2008

It has been a busy few months at edgeofmyseat.com and we’re in the process of updating the site to showcase some more of the things we have been doing recently, such as our work to develop the Greenbelt Festivals ticketing system.

edgeofmyseat.com news - august 2007

On September 1st edgeofmyseat.com will celebrate it’s 6th birthday. We are also happy to announce that, on that date, Drew McLellan will be joining the company as a Director and full time senior web developer. Adding another full time developer means that as a company we should be able to be even more responsive to your requests and Drew’s experience as a developer will be of great benefit to all of our work.

Reporting Bugs - a how to guide

When working with a developer or team of developers on an application – whether you are a designer working with developers or an end client hiring developers – you all want the same end result, a slick and bug free application. During the testing process of any application it is likely that some bugs or issues will show up and this article aims to explain how to report bugs and problems effectively so that your developers don’t need to spend time working out what the problem is before being able to fix it.

A More Comfortable Chair

If you are reading this article then, all being well, you are also looking at the shiny new edgeofmyseat.com website and identity. The design and new logo created for us by the wonderful Jon Hicks of hicksdesign.

Website Accessibility

The Disability Discrimination Act requires that web site owners in the UK ensure that their web sites are accessible to people with disabilities – just as public buildings are required to be accessible to these groups. In this article I will explain what this actually means for your existing site; how you can ensure that any new site that you are planning meets accessibility requirements; and how accessibility benefits you, the business owner.

Dreamweaver MX and Valid (X)HTML

In a previous article I discussed ways in which we could develop using Dreamweaver 4 and still attain standards compliancy in our html. In that article I had to take into account the fact that Dreamweaver 4 really wasn’t up to the job and to produce valid mark-up we were reduced to altering the default document and other hacks in order to be sure that we didn’t introduce any non-valid code.

Dreamweaver MX and External CSS-P

This tutorial will walk through how to develop a layout in Dreamweaver MX that relies on an external stylesheet for the positioning. Whether you have developed the stylesheet yourself using another tool, or have downloaded a stylesheet from sites such as glish.com or Blue Robot in order to try your hand at CSS layouts, the below techniques should be helpful. To get started, I have prepared a simple stylesheet that I shall refer to in this tutorial. You can download it here.

Web Standards

Change is the in air in the web development community, you may not like it but it’s happening. If you have spent much time in any forum for designers and developers lately you have probably run into a ‘web standards debate’ (or should that be flame war) or the ‘tables for layout versus CSS positioning debate’. The issues tend to be intertwined, confused and after dividing those with a strong opinion either way into two opposing camps, leave those just starting out and those who were happily unaware of these issues standing around wondering what on earth just happened.

It doesn't have to look the same

In the old days you would rarely see anything in your logs but Netscape and IE, at one point their usage was about 50/50. There was a general understanding that a good web developer would ensure their site looked the same in both browsers, sometimes going to incredible browser checking, two site building lengths to attain this goal.

Lets fast forward a few years …

Valid HTML 4.01 in Dreamweaver 4

You’ve got deadlines piling up and no time to lovingly handcode every page of the monster site that had to be ready yesterday, Dreamweaver is the answer for many developers and teams and it speeds up development time (particularly in a team environment) hugely. But you aspire to valid html, the W3C html validator is in your bookmarks and the top visitor in your referer logs. Can rapid development in Dreamweaver ever result in code that validates?

Boring CSS?

Your CSS Bores Me writes Chris Casciano at ChunkySoup.net, pondering why CSS designs all look the same.

Its an accusation I hear frequently, along with ‘people only use CSS positioning for personal sites’.

Media Types

Today’s web developer is being faced with an ever increasing number of browsers and devices used to access their web pages. Alternate devices used by the visually impaired have become higher profile in recent months but devices such as PDAs and Web TV are also on the increase. How is anyone supposed to design and develop pages for this myriad of possibilities?