Oh – this is great!  I’m off to my kids school to make sure we get some of these kits …

What’s MaKey MaKey?

MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything inbetween:

Take 2 minutes to checkout the video … and if you can, spend $35 and order one for your kids … they’ll thank you!

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Love this great book shelf … currently the favoured solution for our kitchen bookshelves that are causing our current gargoyle bookends an undue amount of stress. (more info.  via)

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This is a wonderful project: Code Club - with a mission to get kids coding in schools, and an overall vision to ‘create a nationwide after school coding club for children aged 10 – 11′.  Sounds wonderful.  I did my first coding aged about 10 when I wrote a small program in Basic for a school project.  The program was a quiz which asked you questions about the history of the police force in the UK.  High level stuff.

But it was awesome.  Get a question right and it played a happy tune.  Get one wrong and a police siren sounded.  Look out!

Then, in secondary school, I took Computer Studies for a couple of years, and all the joy was sucked out of me with a big sucky thing.  It sucked.  It had no relevance to anything – I could see very few practical applications in learning the history of computers (okay, it might be interesting to me now – but to a 14 year old?).  But the coding thing was great – write a program, see the results, and people could use it – play on it, learn from it, be quietly impressed by it.  Although I preferred it when they were loudly impressed.

Anyway, this is what Code Club want to instil, I believe: that sense of joy and wonder about making a machine do your bidding.  

You can sign up as someone who wants to help with the curriculum, or as someone who’d like to run a program in your school, to donate a little cash or just to express your interest and say ‘Cool!’

This is people who are trying to teach our kids stuff off of their own back.  It’s worth a re-tweet or share.

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This is interesting.  Browsers are slowly ditching ‘favicons’ (the little logos that appear in the URL address bar of your web browser), and Firefox is the latest to do so.  The reason is that it is very easy to create a favicon in the form of a padlock – giving your dodgy e-commerce site fake legitimacy.  I’d never thought of that.

Here’s the link to the post from a software engineer at Mozilla. (via)

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Ah, I love these old photos of NYC.  Particularly this one of painters on the Brooklyn Bridge:

Oh wait, and this one too, where the newspaper headline reads “Nazi Army Now 75 Miles From Paris”

But they’re all good.  (via)

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• Great to see so much responsive web design going on

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It’s great to see more and more responsive web design going on … and this wonderful showcase highlights some of the best current work.

This example from the University of California in San Diego is lovely – a good, strict responsive grid.  It doesn’t try to do too much, but each screen resolution looks native and as if it were built specifically for that screen size.  Perhaps the navigation, at the smallest width, is a bit clunky – but it’s very effective and overall a really good example.

You might expect it from dConstruct – a digital media conference that takes place in Brighton each year – but this is still a wonderful example.  If you define responsive web design as having fluid grid, flexible images, and media queries – then this does the lot extremely well.  A nice example all round.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the Media Queries gallery for sure.

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So, today I received a really interesting looking tender document.  It was well thought out, neatly presented, contained all the information I’d need to put together a full proposal and was, all in all, pretty enticing.  Except for one thing.  One of the things they requested in their document was:

A concise submission should be returned including: (…) Sample page of Proposed Design

You see this less and less, but it’s still there.  This request for free work.  It is well documented why designers of all stripes should resist this type of request but I don’t think anyone has put it better than Paul Boag in this article.

And it was his first point that I used to come back to the person in question: it costs everybody money.

Photo by e-magic – http://flic.kr/p/5Y57G

Whilst on the face of it, the potential client is getting a good deal (they send out 10 tender documents, they receive 10 pieces of free design) it actually ends up costing them money.  There is an undeniable cost of doing business involved in creating a design mock up – it takes time (not just design time, but you’ll need to research the industry, the competition, etc.), there may be materials involved (stock photography, fonts, etc), and – unless you’re the designer I’ve not yet met who nails it first time every time – you’re going to want to do a couple of revisions yourself before you send it to the client.

So, let’s say, there’s 8 hours work involved in putting together a reasonable home page mock up.  The cost of that to the designer is likely to be over £400.  Now, if I have to do this for each proposal I receive, but I only win one in 3 tenders, then I have to cover the cost of the failed two tenders in the one successful one.

I end up having to bill the ‘successful’ client for 24 hours work, but only do 8 hours for them.

That doesn’t work for anyone.

Last year I wrote about a better pitching process and this speaks to some of the same issues.  If you want to assess the skills of a web designer before you hire them – and of course you should – then look through their design portfolio.  Get some references.  Speak to past clients.  You want to hire someone who has the design skills – but design is about more than drawing pictures, it’s about solving problems and communicating goals.

You’re not going to be able to understand if your designer can do that by producing a piece of speculative design work.

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I’ve just completed this wordpress based web design project for our friendly local accountant, Gerard O’Brien.  It’s a fully responsive website – so you can view it on your iPad, mobile phone, desktop, laptop, fridge top, etc. and all will be well.  Take a look:

… and should you ever need an accountant in Fermanagh, you know where to go.

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A post of mine explaining some of the factors influencing the price of e-commerce websites has just been published by FreelanceSwitch:

“I would like an e-commerce site just like someothershop.com – how much would that cost me?” - It’s a common enough question, and one that always leads your average freelance web designer to take a deep breath and sigh ‘Well, let me see …’. There are many factors that influence the cost of an ecommerce web project, but when you communicate the vagaries to clients, there tend to be three that can have a huge impact – and are often only dealt with summarily: products, postage and payments

You can read the full article here: Pricing Ecommerce Web Design Projects

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Something I try and stress to people now when developing websites is that the key to getting them to deliver is to understand that it is not actually about the website itself, it’s about the content.

Your content should exist independently of your website – you should be able to break it into chunks and deliver it across different channels.  You might have an in-house video which could be pushed to YouTube and Facebook.  A blog post that originates on your website could make a good question on LinkedIn, as well as a short update to your Facebook fan page.  One of your ‘frequently asked questions’ could be posted to Twitter – both to elicit responses and to start a conversation.

Photo by Beatnic – http://flic.kr/p/9EiyVy

And so on.  Try not to think of your website as the final destination for everything you know about your company and try and see it as simply a hub for your information.  Content may start here but it can go to many other places as well.  Places where your audience will be.  There’s no need to wait for them to come and find you when you can go out and find them!

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