We’ve just updated our website for the open source project, HTML5 Boilerplate for Shopify

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And we’d appreciate your thoughts! Please have a look over the site and let us know what you think.

The project started around six months ago with the release of the 2.0 version of HTML5Boilerplate, seeing the great starter code I realised I’d have to convert that code into a Shopify template every time I built a new shop, so as a company we decided to document and release the code as an open source project with the hope of involving the community more and building a better release with their feedback.

We’ve already released one shop based on an early version of the code, Spook Show Angel and hope to have many more.

I’m currently working on a site with, wait for it, 30% IE6 users.

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This sort of thing takes your breath away if you’re a developer on the web of any type, IE6, released by Microsoft many, many years ago (August 2001, so almost 11).

You could have a quick google around to see why IE6 is terrible but I’d save time if I were you, it’s the web browser equivalent of Comic Sans hated by designers, transparent to users.

We stopped supporting IE6 a year or so ago when the average percentage of users dropped to around 1-2%. Our sites would still work very well, but certain graphical niceties and special effects would be non functional.

The point of this post, if there is one, is that we always, always focus on our users, it doesn’t matter if it’s harder, less fashionable, if there’s less opportunity to use “cool toys” or add shiny transitions between pages. Industry awards might not often go to “who has the best IE6 support?” but if there are this many users on a platform 11 years old, we’ll deliver them the very best experience we can.

Responsive Design – A comment on “Missing The Point”

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I just read an interesting article on Responsive Web Design, something that we try to build into our sites here at TTD Towers.

The point, as far as I can see, of the article is that sites should be device agnostic. That means that sites should not judge what hardware or software is used to access information or services, but should adapt themselves to the available resources. That could be big screen / small screen, fast connection / slow connection etc.

The commentors, referencing a second article linked in the original have instead got hooked on the sound bite:

If you could only do one thing to prepare your desktop site for mobile and had to choose between employing media queries to make it look good on a mobile device or optimizing the site for performance, you would be better served by making the desktop site blazingly fast.

Rubbish I tell you.

And why is that? Well, for the plain and simple reason that if you aren’t optimising your sites to the Nth degree, you have failed web 101. I’ve been approaching each GIF from the ground up, shrinking them and reducing their colour palettes since before most web designers were out of short trousers. Building small, optimised HTML, CSS and JS hand in hand with highly optimised graphics where required – that doesn’t need to be said does it? You don’t think you win at Web Design if you don’t do that? It doesn’t need stating, it’s a given.

So:

Yes – Responsive Design is here, it’s staying, it’s required. It’s another thing we need to do, another step to complicate web site design and development, but another step to simplify and improve the lives of our users and that is always the point.

The Tall Designer and Charlee Says Offer New Discount for Vegetarian Society Members

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Member of the Vegetarian Society? Get 10% off all our web design, social media and content writing services

We’ve never been partial to keeping our mouths shut about something we believe in, so you’ve probably seen our often passionate and sometimes inflammatory tweets and Facebook updates about vegetarianism. Now we’ve decided to put our money where our big mouth is, which means that all fellow members of the Vegetarian Society get a cruelty-free 10% off our services, which include web design, web copywriting, content writing services and brand development. Just tell us your Vegetarian Society number when you make an enquiry and we’ll sort out the discount (and high five you for saving the animals and their little faces).

Miles’ web design services got a mention in last month’s issue of the Vegetarian Society magazine, and Charlee’s writing services will be in this month’s, so keep an eye out for her if you’re a subscriber.

Not a Veggie Yet?

Never fear. You can still get a high five from us: why not start with Meat Free Monday and make one change that will benefit your health and the environment?

Refusing to work for a business that sells Foie Gras.

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Foie Gras, most right minded people agree, is a barbaric practice that should be outlawed. Quite how we’ve got to the 21st century without being horrified that it ever existed, let alone still exists, I can’t understand.

However – that’s not the point of this post. The point is that my personal brand, and my business brand is very closely interlinked. I’m a “Passionate Vegetarian” as my Twitter profile says, I could no more work for a business that sold Foie Gras than I could work for a slaughter house. My personal beliefs blur across to my business life (they go in the other direction too).

I’m proud to say that when we were approached by a German online food shop to do some work on their site, we checked their ethical standing and immediately found it wanting. We refused the work, as we’d refuse it from anyone with questionable ethics.

This stance isn’t just about Foie Gras, or indeed about the meat industry. Although as a vegetarian of course I’d rather nobody ate meat, I understand that I live in a world where plenty of people do, and that there are ethical approaches to the selling of meat products that do not include cruel and unusual treatment of livestock.

This stance is actually about ethical businesses. By refusing to work with businesses with poor animal welfare policies, unethical business practices, “dark Pattern” interfaces, sub standard products, or anything else, we can hold our heads up high and say:

“We’re proud of who we are, what we do, and who we do it for”.

Achieving Inbox 0 with my Mac and Omnifocus for Mac/iPad/iPhone a Getting Things Done process for Mail.app

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You know I even keep a list of blog subjects and have a weekly reminder to post? Do I do a weekly blog post? No. Suppose I should be glad of being so busy.

Anyway – “Inbox 0″ a noble aim and one that in my own way, I achieve every day. This is how I do it, you may want to change things to fit. It works very well with Dave Allen’s GTD process and perfectly fits the sweep process of bin it, file it, do it if it takes less than 2 minutes or put it in your task inbox.

Requirements:

  • A Mac using Mail.app with a “Smartfolder” set up to filter in all unread mail.
  • Omnifocus for Mac
  • Omnifocus for iPad
  • Omnifocus for iPhone
Process from my Mac.
I only ever look at my Smart Mailbox, not my actual inbox. When that Smart Mailbox says (0) next to it, I’m at Inbox Zero. So I’m looking at the folder, an email comes in, or, maybe I’ve been working on something else with Mail.app hidden, I come back in and there’s 10 things in the box, I do one of these things.
  • Is it Spam? Delete it
  • Is it a notification I don’t need now I’ve read it? Delete it.
  • Is it a notification I need to keep even though I’ve read it? (receipts, booking confirmations etc.) move onto the next email, now the email is “read” it won;t appear in the Smart Mailbox anymore, ergo it’s dropped straight into “filed” without me needing to do anything.
  • Do I need to do something with the email that takes less than 120 seconds – do it now, sub decision, do I need to keep this email still? If so, move onto the next email, this one will be marked as “read” and drop out of the Smart Folder. If I don;t need to keep it, I hit delete immediately after actioning.
  • Do I need to do something with the email and it will take more than 120 seconds? I Highlight some text in the email that will remind me what it is, hit my shortcut Cmd-Shift-comma, Omnifocus pops up ready populated, I just hit enter. The text & a link to the email is dropped in my Getting Things Done bucket.
Process from my iPad / iPhone
You Can’t have smart mailboxes on either iPhones or iPads, shame. Omnifocus also isn;t anywhere near as well integrated (Apple’s fault, not Omni) So instead I do this.
  • Is it Spam? Delete it
  • Is it a notification I don’t need now I’ve read it? Delete it.
  • Is it a notification I need to keep even though I’ve read it? (receipts, booking confirmations etc.) move onto the next email, now the email is “read” it won’t appear in the Smart Mailbox on my Mac anymore, ergo it’s dropped straight into “filed” without me needing to do anything.
  • Do I need to do something with the email that takes less than 120 seconds – do it now, sub decision, do I need to keep this email still? If so, move onto the next email, this one will be marked as “read” and drop out of the Smart Folder (on my Mac). If I don’t need to keep it, I hit delete immediately after actioning.
  • Do I need to do something with the email and it will take more than 120 seconds? I Highlight some text in the email that will remind me what it is, hit “copy”, switch over to Omnifocus for phone/pad, hit new, paste the text right in and hit “go”. The text  is dropped in my Getting Things Done bucket. This isn;t as good as you no longer have a direct link to the email itself, but it’s better than nothing at all and as long as you copy the right text, you’ll know what it’s about.
A few supporting actions that help this go well.
  • Every week I have a repeating task in Omnifocus to quickly run through the last few days of emails in my actual inbox, not the Smart Mailbox. I use this to delete any emails that I don’t need that may have dropped through the net.
  • Every time I get an email that’s non specific, say a newsletter etc. I think if I need to keep receiving it, if not I hit unsubscribe in an attempt to keep my email inbox to a minimum.
  • The search function in Mail.App – is FANTASTIC. No really it is. You don’t need to obsessively categorise things, there’s no need. When you can type, for example, from:Miles into the search box and you get every email from Miles, or subject:dinner – why go to all that effort to manually categorise anything?
So. It works well for me – how do you do things? Any ideas on how to improve things? Look forward to your thoughts.

Why Your Company is Like Jack Nicholson

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My wife, who is far better at writing than me (good job as she’s our copy writer and content strategist), wrote about our standard client questionnaire which we ask clients to complete when they come to us to talk about a project.

I should have written about it myself but as I say, she’s much better at it than me – tell us your thoughts, both clients and fellow designers opinions welcomed!

The last spasms of a dying business model – Why the Guardian iPad App is a step into the past

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Apple have released IOS5 (and a new phone, you may have heard of it), much will be written about new features, the notification centre, the ground breaking ability to take a photo by pressing an actual physical button – but I don’t have the time or inclination to write a 5,000 word review. I do have the inclination to write about the “Newsstand” however, or as I shall call it from now on “The Last Spasms Of A Dying Business Model” TLSOADBM for short. Specifically I am writing about the new Guardian iPad app – the shiniest, yet most backwards looking piece of software associated with TLSOADBM (alright, Newstand).

What’s great. Initially at least, the app is good looking and easy to use. It’s clear, fast, responsive to touches and swipes. Full screen photography (in both landscape and portrait) is included with many articles, inline hyperlinks have been inserted leading off site for more info.

What’s terrible. Leaving the elephant in the room for a moment -

  • Comments created by active interested readers on articles that are also on the website, are not included
  • Text cannot be zoomed, copied or interacted with
  • If you try and share an article via twitter, it ignores your existing twitter account information and asks you for it again (something I was impressed the Lanyrd app does not do). Reports from Twitter land itself say there are many problems getting the app to share via twitter at all.
  • What we would call “thumbnail images” on the web proper, are just images, they cannot be touched to view a close up
  • I cannot, in any way, personalise the experience. I don’t like sport, nothing against it, but I don’t want to see it. I’d be a happy man if I never saw a peep out of the world cup, the rugby, or the accursed Olympics. The app offers me no way of even hiding the sport section, let alone promoting articles and subjects I am interested in.
  • Even though we’re asked to pay £9.99 a month for the paper, it still has adverts. The Channel 4 logo is rather brashly spread all over the paper and it’s adverts intersperse the content. CH4 lost all it’s respect when they started Big Brother so quite why they think Guardian readers will be interested in their latest piece of ill researched trash / celebrity waffle I don’t know.

The worst thing they have done, and it’s unforgivable – the paper is out of date by the time you download it. The app is a literal representation of that days paper with all of the major drawbacks that that implies. A new edition is available at 6AM UK time, if a plane flew into the houses of parliament at 6:01, this app would’t tell you about it. Integration with the up to date, regularly visited website is tacked on to the side of some articles as if they knew there should be something but were’t quite sure what to do.

There’s also a “On The Website” link as the final piece of the main navigation, which loads up new stories of the day – as if being up to date is something you may want to opt out of.

A simple responsive design for the Guardians existing website would have solved all of the problems, and for a fraction of the cost of this app. They could have offered the option of a paid subscription (for the very reasonable price of £9.99 a month) which would not show me any adverts. For people unwilling or unable to pay – the adverts stay the way they are on the current site. I don’t think I’m new with this idea, ah what’s this? The Boston Globe did it just the other day to massive international acclaim.

I should add, that the competition on Newsstand is broadly just as bad and generally worse than The Guardian iPad app. The Metro is an embarrassment of press release regurgitation in the physical world already, their iPad implementation is laughable. You’re forced into landscape (despite the splash screen starting in portrait?), it’s typographically hideous, text is uninteractive, calls to action do not look touchable, lazy, dull navigation dominates the top of the screen and it also uses the “daily issue” metaphor we so soundly threw away the day the internet invented blogs.

The Guardian app is a step backwards not forwards, it is trying to fit an old media paradigm (the daily print) into a world where days don’t really exist, into a world where we can update things as they happen, in a world where you can write an article about a terrorist attack as soon as it happens in 6 words, extend it to 6 paragraphs an hour later and extend that to a 6 section in depth analysis. None of the possibilities and advantages of working with a fast, constantly connected smart media device are used, even when doing so would be cheaper.

Newststand will never be the success iTunes or the App Store have been, it will probably find a market for those who haven’t yet moved away from the monthly publishing model (I admit I obsessively collect SFX magazine (also available on iPad)), but for anyone who has got used to a stream of articles rather than chunks handed out at the discretion of publishers – it’s a bit pointless.

You fail Guardian, you fail totally and utterly in a way I did not expect you to. This endeavour deserves to die a quick painless death, and although I’m sure it will die, I sadly think it will be long and drawn out, over shadowing what will come next. I want to pay for your content, I want to access it in a timely manner, I don’t want adverts and I want to access your content on the device of my choosing, why don’t you want my money?

The Pomodoro Technique

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A short blog this week, but I am trying to force myself to write more so instead of just clicking “complete” and not actually posting – I’ll tell you quickly about Pomodoro Technique (PT) for concentrating your time and getting better at planning.

I’m terrible at staying focussed – I don’t seem to be able to fix the problem so instead I use tools to help me better deal with it. The best tool I have come across is Getting Things Done by David Allen, you all already know and practice good GTD though right? The PT however is a simple mind trick you can learn in a day, that helps you really focus on the actual things you need to get done. You don’t need any shiny software, all you need is a kitchen timer (or other timing device) and a pen and paper. I use an app I got from the App Store, but you really could use anything.

At it’s heart, PD divides your day into 25 minute work sessions and 5 minute break periods, along with larger breaks throughout the day (and lunch ofc!) concentrating, uninterrupted on a given task for that entire 25 minutes and being very strict about keeping distraction clear from your minds eye view.

The PT has genuinely helped me map my days out better, and to be realistic about what I can and can’t get done in a given time, try it out, at most you have 25 minutes to lose :)