development

My good friend Mitch Goldstein (or @mgoldst as you may know him) has asked if I'd give a talk to his graphic design students in a class he's teaching at Rhode Island College. I sat in those very halls a few too many years ago than I care to remember - but since that's where I got my start (designing and developing the College's first web site), it seemed like a great opportunity.

I know, I know. If you listen to the Boagworld podcast or follow his incessant tweeting and audioboo-ing you'll doubtless be saying something like 'good heavens, don't give him any more reasons to inflate his overblown sense of self-worth' - but I think that he's struck upon a really important topic, and one that has an enormous impact on the future of our industry.

Well - had to be done. I needed to get my site updated from Drupal 5 to 6 in order to implement some better features and in general keep up with what I do for clients. It was also useful to go through the upgrade process on an existing site to get used to the pitfalls.

Overall it wasn't all that bad, but I did have to reimagine how I wanted to deal with some views, and recreate some of them from scratch. I haven't had time to really dig into the design, but this had to come first and setting a deadline helped move things forward faster.

I've traded a few tweets over the past day or two on the subject of good books for web professionals. I use that term to avoid 'designer' - as that seemed limiting or possibly a bit arbitrary. I think that information architecture, understanding business requirements and translating them into web site features and functionality, usability/user exerience, interaction design and visual design are all distinct enough that they can be a specialization unto themselves.

I've been working full-time at (add)ventures since late 2007, but thought it would be worth it to share my thoughts on the process of interactive projects. When I was interviewing at (add)ventures I was asked the question 'how do I tackle interactive projects,' and this got me thinking about not just the steps, but the philosophy behind them. While I think this might have been more than was anticipated, I thoroughly enjoyed the process!

Marketing? Corporate Communications? Or is it IT?

It's been a common discussion lately on some of the web design boards and podcasts I listen to. Unfortunately I think there are some significant limitations to all of those choices: Marketing has a primary function of communicating to consumers/end users; Corporate Communications is generally focused on communicating to the media and investors, and IT simply wants to get something done that fills a need but doesn't cause problems with the 'real' concerns of their department.

Drupal is a quite capable platform, and I've used it quite a lot, both for work and for personal projects. Its Achilles heel though is the admin interface - with ultimate flexibility comes a lot of configuration choices. While the simple solution is to tell the client 'just don't look at that stuff' - it's not ideal, and can be intimidating. Enter some key modules: jstools, form_store and formfilter.

I was a bit annoyed with Drupal when I started working with it about a year ago. Much of the annoyance stemmed from my own inexperience with the platform, but a lingering issue is regarding META tags and Drupal's lack of native support for creating them dynamically. Eventually I found the 'nodewords' module, which does a nice job.

After seeing how much attention my last post on Drupal and accessibility got, and how much time we've been spending with it I realized that we've developed something really worth sharing: a lot of experience with Drupal and accessibility, and a bag of tricks and good practices to go along with it. So I've decided to write more on the topic and hopefully develop a resource for others struggling with the same issues.

Well, the FOWD conference was last week and I have to say that it was absolutely the best (work-related) two days I've spent in a long time. Everything about it was just fantastic (apart from leaving at 4:30am on Monday to get to the workshops starting at 9). Workshops with Paul Boag and Armin Vit were great, lunch in between with Paul Boag, Steve Smith and Dan Mall was really nice as well. Tuesday's conference was just packed with great presentations, and the after-party (and the 'in-between-the-conference-and-afterparty' stop at the bar next door) was a blast.