James Peel

Cool

Check the video

had a wander round urbis yesterday. some great photography on the ground floor, manga on the first floor, and finally up to the bit i was most interested in, the D&AD exhibition.

Worth a visit to see the massive stationery and spend some time watching the show reels, but ultimately a bit of a small affair.

David Plunkett has just launched his new website, blog and portfolio, under the aleter-ego of quirksmode. Congrats, check it out and give him a job

I seem to have got onto some kind of offshore web development spam list. I’m getting a torrent of emails detailing the benefits of outsourcing all of my coding to a foreign country, and whilst this is insulting as a freelancer, just check out these prices:

Web Designer (Skills: Dreamweaver / Adobe Photoshop/Flash MX): £700/ $1400 per man month (180 hours)
PHP Web Developer (Skills: PHP/ MySqL): £800/ $1600 per man month (180 hours)
ASP.NET Web Developer (Skills: ASP / HTML / VBSCRIPT / JAVASCRIPT / SQL SERVER): £800/ $1600 per man month (180 hours)

£700 a MONTH for a basic web designer! this is a fraction of the cost you pay in this country for a quality individual. Whilst i’m sure this is tempting to a number of people, I cannot stress strongly enough the dissatisfaction you will meet in using one of these services. The substantial language and timezone barriers aside, I am yet to meet anyone who has been satisfied with their offshore project. In those who have signed off work, the project lifetime has been unexpectedly short due to poor development practices and coding, and often work has been redone at greater expense. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Music chart top 40 style listings interface for design heavy websites, love the way this one works – check the design charts

I’ve been brushing up on my accessibility knowledge for a couple of recent jobs, and its a real minefield. Most standards based developers should have a good understanding of accessibility principles and how to implement them, but staying up to date is important. (Incedentaly I still find it amusing that people think accessibility is a job for the developer alone – shouldn’t it be fundamental objective the site as a project, not a deliverable)

Although there are a number of key ideas that have been cemented into the guidlelines, compared to version 1 I found them to be very lengthy, lacking the formats that made v1 digestible, lacking the checklist and testing support of v1, and im not the only one. Infact, there is a spectacular article on a list apart, entitled To Hell With WCAG 2 which is a thorough berating of what should be industry standard guidelines.

Have a read and leave your thoughts, comments are open.