Thoughts & writings

Recently, I got some feedback on some design work I was doing, and was expecting people to talk about the look and feel, but surprisingly, I also got some input on the quality of my markup. It was suggested to me that I could trim my markup by removing unnecessary tags, classes and ID’s. Upon taking a look at my code, I realised that with more efficient use of CSS, I could indeed produce much better markup.

My old site may only have been around for about 4 weeks, but already I was starting to tire of it. In the time it took me to make it, I felt that it had lacked direction, and ended up without a clear focus or vision. It didn’t seem to have the style I wanted, and the way I had coded it was making it more difficult to maintain. For these reasons and more, I decided to redesign from scratch.

Web design and development has come a long way in the last 10 years, I don’t think many would dispute that. Over the years, may new standards and practices have been put forward and proven themselves to be well worth implementing into how we design, develop and maintain our websites. In this post, I will be rounding up the best methods and practices in web design and development in 2010 and why you need to adopt them now to avoid being left behind.

Supermarket websites are likely to be some of the most highly visited sites in the UK. Having a mass appeal website such as a supermarket site that offers online shopping for a hugely varied audience will surely bring a large set of challenges. A supermarket site needs to be both highly usable and accessible to all visitors, regardless of their choice of browsing technology, age, or level of disability. If not, then it could end up with frustrated users, lost customers, and lost revenue.

We see vertical menus everywhere. Blogs are the most common place, and this one is no exception. When there are multiple categories or ‘choices’ available for a user to click on, horizontal menus just won’t work, unless you want the user to have to scroll horizontally because your page is 3000 pixels wide. Therefore, the vertical link list is generally how things are done. So, how can we make them more usable?