Transformation: making a ruckus
some might ask if we can afford to in these times of financial constraint, but I would argue that we can’t afford not to. We will die as IT departments if we don’t – we can’t afford just to keep the lights on, we have to find new ways of doing things.
Dr Christine Sexton
http://cicsdir.blogspot.com/2010/09/no-longer-gatekeepers.html
Our audience is our most trusted asset, more important than even our authors.
Many people ask me, “How can I get started in web design?” or, “What skills do I need to start making web applications?” While it would be easy to recommend stacks of books, and dozens of articles with 55 tips for being 115% better than the next guy, the truth is that you don’t need learn anything new in order to begin. The most important thing is simply to start.
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2538-the-first-step-is-to-start
My first gig was for a small charity that I was doing summer admin for and they didn’t have a site.. so I just went for it.
I consume a lot of other peoples stuff and happily feel that if I can in any way give back, I should. So the blog is creative common licensed to make other peoples lives easier should they choose to use any of my ramblings.
I went for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 as that seems pretty lenient and used by a number of people I respect and trust – if it’s good enough for them, then it’s good enough for me.
Photo credit Thomas Hawk
When it comes to my web design clients, they all want control of the content and rightly so, – plus there is NO money in offering to do it for them.
Typically my clients say that they want full control and dynamic this and dynamic that. In reality 90% never touch the site once it launches. However, about once every 1-4 years most of them will want to alter the copy (text and images) of the odd section of the site.
I used to tell them to use Contribute which is an affordable content management system (CMS) that works pretty much like Microsoft Word. The problem was that they didn’t use it enough to justify the money in their eyes or know enough about how to use it and thus would ever never go through with the purchase or contact me. A dilemma for both parties.
Luckily for me, I am not the only person to have come across this problem. Enter Unify, the affordable and most crucially, simple content editor built by the talented Unit Interactive.
The feature set that made Unify stand out was:
If you have a site that needs a simple to use tool then look no further than Unify. I have used it on Caroline Menzies and today www.adaokorliakpe.com whilst I typed this.
So while it is not all things to all people, it certainly makes the client happy and keeps you on budget.
Last month Robert Scoble wrote about one of my favorite things: bikes, specifically MotoGP, and Lorenzo’s use of twitter for personal branding.
What I like about this post, is that we can see Jorge Lorezno actually wants to connect with fans and sees Twitter as the most obvious way. You can’t shake everybodies hand or sign all the autographs, but you can make connections to everybody by tweeting.
Robert actually met with Jorge and thus his observations are based on this meeting as opposed to heresay. He has no hope of out shining Rossi in the popularity stakes now – but when Rossi hangs his boots up, Jorge is better positioned to be the most well-known after him, I certainly paid more attention of noticing that he tweets. That and he is completely dominating on the track.
If the by-product of using twitter is that we as fans think we know him better and it raises his profile, and he gets paid more in sponsorship, than good on him. What makes it interesting and refreshing also is that is is clearly Jorge’s tweets and not some marketing angle. If he wants to know what film to watch, he can ask his ‘fans’ and share what he is doing outside of the office job – just like you and me, and that’s the beauty.
Photo credit – Robert Scoble
The first thing you notice about the book is the restraint. It claims to only tell the dear reader exactly what they need to know in the physical book, leaving us to use the internet for the rest . The book reminds me of the highway code. The restraint is purposeful and even mentioned in the foreward by Jeffrey Zeldman:
..only as many words and pictures as are needed
It didn’t take long to read and with ten or so other books waiting to be read I am thankful. I was very happy with the subject matter covered and the chosen level of depth – saying no more than the author felt was required for our brushes with HTML5 in 2010. If this book was to be published in say 1-2 years time, I bet it would leap-frog of all of the topics here today and just tell us what we need to know.
Curious about HTML5? then this is the book for you to give you the lay of the land. Off the back of reading it, I switched from old school to new school HTML5. Enjoy.