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.

In a piece of happy serendipity, there’s a big user-centred design project underway at the moment with the redesign of the Drupal community site and, with it being open software, the whole process is being conducted transparently – which means a great opportunity to study and learn. Leisa Reichelt is leading the discovery and planning stages, and blogging every step; you can read the draft Experience Strategy, how Drupal users were defined, and how to get involved. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

I won’t be leaving web development behind completely; it’s my passion, I wouldn’t be able to. Especially now that we’re entering into very exciting times with the forthcoming release of IE8; not because of any new features, but because we’ll finally have a completely stable, cross-browser platform of CSS2.1 to develop on. The IE team are doing a sterling job of releasing information about the new browser; for example, discussing developer tools and browser-specific CSS prefixes. Let’s hope they don’t fall into the post-launch silence that happened after the release of IE7.

So, interesting times to come. First, however: a holiday. Back later.