Well the day is here. It is nearly the end of the day and on Sunday I fly to Spain with my family for 2 weeks in the sun - well so the weather forecast says anyway. It will certainly be a lot warmer than Bath has been for the last few weeks.

Holidays are a funny thing - especially when you run the business. This time I have planned ahead - A LOT. I made sure our clients knew several weeks ago that I would be away for 2 weeks. We also have kept communication lines really open here in the office over the last few weeks so the guys here know as much as possible so they can handle things while I am gone. More importantly though is that now there are more of us here I can actually go away for 2 weeks and not have to check my messsages 3 times a day. My wife and I will both majorly appreciate this. It is 3.5 years since I started Digerati Studio and this is the first time I am taking a full break and rest. I CAN’T WAIT!

So that’s enough from me - I will let you know how it went when I get back. In the meantime - go easy on my email inbox while I’m gone.

Hasta luego!

Having graduated from university I am all too familiar with long boring lectures and living with the frustration of limited contact time with lecturers. However, as a BBC news article reports, a microbiology lecturer in West Yorkshire University is utilising technology to make the most of his time help resource his students. He has abolished the traditional lecture in favour for a podcast, supplemented by a blog that answers questions that are sent to him through SMS or email! This frees his time to meet individually and in smaller groups with his students!

A definite breakthrough and an excellent example of technology being embraced and used to its potential in education. It seems that the students who prefer their bed to the lecture hall, have finally won!

Read the article here

Its true what they say - “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”. But this is not acceptable for the attitude of Web Developers! At Digerati Studio Limited, we are committed to providing quality web standard multi-browser accessible websites! But with that comes the challenge to achieve just that!

With the growing rise in popularity and power of Apple in the computing industry, I’m sure a lot of Web Developers are breathing a sigh of relief. However, Windows are soon to unleash their new operating system after many years of XP. With this new release sees the introduction of Internet Explorer 7, which promises to be compliant to W3C web standards.

Its a chicken and egg situation! Do I start from IE and translate to Safari and Firefox, or do I start with Safari and Firefox and translate to IE? Every Web Developer have their own method and theories as to what the correct answer is. I’m not out to make that conclusion. Moreover, I intend to present the joys and frustrations that I, and many other Web Developers face day in - day out!

With the world becoming more and more web savvy, the demand for performance from web based applications and sites are becoming higher and higher! Gone are the days where websites were purely an electronic yellow pages for businesses! Now one can perform almost any function from a web page. With this increase in exposure to more and more people, comes another challenge. Web Developers are now not only required to create multi-functional websites for different operating systems and machines, whether it be a mobile device or desktop computer, they are also required to enable their site to be accessible to anyone.

It is interesting to note that governmental bodies and larger corporations are under increasing scrutiny to comply to accessibility laws. And rightly so! So with this weight of responsibility and consumer demand why would anybody want to be a Web Developer? There lies my point, that it is a challenge, but it is actually really fun! Though every website poses it’s unique challenge and frustrating bug, the satisfaction from de-bugging a site and producing beautifully crafted websites is in itself satisfaction to fuel me to keep building!

So it seems everyone has a blog now. Kids, grannies, large companies, small companies even the BBC. So we thought we should have a go. We are always advising our clients to make sure their website is up to date and changes regularly so this is a good way for us to do the same.

Of course we do try to add recent work to the our work section and will continue to do so. But it is good to have somewhere we can give more opinion based information and even alert our clients and others to what’s happening in the Internet world.

So what will we use it for?
To answer that question completely would mean we are able to see into the future. Much as we would like to - we can’t (yet). However, we have a rough idea of what we will do with this new found opportunity to share our opinions. We will mostly pass comment on all things website-ish. Designing websites, building them, Internet technologies and working with clients. But we may also touch on the ups and downs of running a small business and what it’s like being based in Bath.

There is one thing we will definitely talk about quite a bit, and that’s usability! Interaction design, usability, user experience, accessibility, user testing, user centred design: call it what you like, but we are very passionate about giving the end user the best possible experience. This is what makes us tick and why our clients use us, so it would be a crime not to talk about it lots here and share our thoughts - even if they are only the thoughts of humble designers like us.

Anyway, that’s quite enough for a first entry. Please feel free to browse around and even drop us a line if you have any questions or comments for us - it’s always nice to talk to people.

I’ll be back soon.