Why distractions aren’t necessarily a bad thing

June 5, 2010  FILED TO: Miscellaneous

I’ve been a freelance web designer for over 5 years now and over that time I’ve read many blogs and articles aimed at freelancers that provide advice on productivity and smart working habits.  One of the common themes is the evilness of distractions; it seems that distractions should be avoided at all costs because of their negative impact on productivity so you should shut down your email client / Facebook / Twitter client or even turn off the Internet, schedule time for necessary chores like housework, make yourself sit at your desk for a fixed period of time or until you’ve completed a certain task, and the list goes on.

I’d like to offer an alternative view.

         

WordPress wins CMS Awards

November 20, 2009  FILED TO: Software, Web Design

I’ve been using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) for about four years now.  Back when I began, it was simply a blogging platform but I discovered it was easy to customise, easy for clients to add content and came with lots of useful plugins and an open API, which made it ideal in my eyes for a simple CMS.  Indeed, over the years I’ve created some interesting functionality for different sites using a mixture of plugins and custom code. It seems that other people reached the same conclusion over the years and Wordpress took note and began adding useful CMS features.

And this week, the makers of WordPress finally have recognition for their great work – they have won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award at the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Congratulations WordPress, I will continue to use and recommend your CMS!

         

Learning standards-based HTML & CSS

November 20, 2009  FILED TO: Web Design

A couple of people have asked me recently how I create clean markup so quickly. I don’t find it particularly hard, I do it by hand in a systematic manner. But I have a lot of learning behind me that I apply. So, in this blog I reveal my process as well as a few of the resources I have learned from along the way.

         

The morals of Search Engine Optimisation

May 4, 2009  FILED TO: Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but every time I get an email offering reciprocal links or paid website reviews, I immediately hit the “spam” button and sigh a deep sigh.  In the “real” world, it takes time to build a good reputation, for individuals and for businesses; in the Internet world, it seems that people don’t have the patience for this, they’re happy to follow immoral or unethical Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) practices in order to grow a false reputation for their website.  And the smarter search engines get, the smarter the schemes get.  “Black Hat” SEO used to involve reams of hidden keywords at the bottom of pages and keyword stuffing (adding large numbers of irrelevant keywords and phrases to pages).  Search Engines now penalise pages if they find this.  Instead, we’re seeing practices like duplicate sites and paid reviews (website owners pay a company to write a review of their site with a link to it).