Web Directions have posted the results of their 2008 survey today; full results and selected highlights are available. The most shocking result to me is that 10% of respondents still use tables for layout.
Today is my penultimate day in my current job; next week I’m going on a trip to Spain, and when I get back I’m starting my new job at the award-winning Preloaded agency. My focus will be shifting away from client-side development and onto information architecture; it’s a fantastic challenge for me, and I’m very excited about working on top brands for a top agency.
I’ve been slowly introducing IA into my role over the past three years, and so this is a logical step for me to take. I’ll be sad to leave my current agency, but delighted to be moving to somewhere I’ll be able to focus on what I think are the next hot topics on the web: findability & usability.
Back in March of this year I read the article Japan: URL’s Are Totally Out, which showed the trend amongst advertisers in Japan to forsake URLs and instead show a search term (read the article; it explains better than I can).
So I was intrigued when I saw what I believe may be the first instance of this strategy being used here, for Orange’s new “I am” campaign:
Anyone not reading this in an RSS feed will notice that I’ve installed a new theme. I was never really happy with the previous one, as it was based on a design that had been rejected from another project and was called into action before it was ready.
I’ve given this one a version number of 0.5, as I still have a lot I want to do with it, notably: embedding more microformats in the code; adding more progressive enhancement to the CSS; making more use of WordPress’ tagging system; and testing more thoroughly in IE.
However, I’m pretty pleased with the more typographic direction in this design, and am excited to be using a theme I genuinely care about.
If any readers have any constructive criticism to give, please go ahead and do so in the comments. However, do please be gentle with me!
The company I work for has a lot of SMB websites to produce over the next three or four months so we’re looking for a client-side developer to come in and help us out for a short term. I placed an ad on a few websites with details of what we’re looking for, and waited for the applications to come in.
When they did, I was shocked. The majority of them were terrible. From the introductory email to the CV to the examples provided, only one or two were good enough for consideration.
To pass on advice to prospective job seekers (and hopefully make my job a little easier in future), here are five tips for applying for a job in web development:
Over at A List Apart they’re asking people in the web industry to participate in their first annual web design survey, to try and build up a profile of who we are and what we do.
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
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