Entries Tagged 'site launches' ↓

Forums: some people love ‘em, some people don’t.

The debate - mailing list or forum - has come up at one time or another on almost every mailing list and/or forum i’ve ever participated in. Some people love one, some love the other. Some use both (that group would include me).

In the spirit of diversity, the Web Standards Group - traditionally in the mailing list camp - have launched a forum for discussing web standards and related issues, in web-based forum format for those who prefer that style. The site was launched in December, but with the Christmas/New Year/holiday period traditionally letting people switch off their PCs for a while, it’s only now that posts are starting to pick up.

Being the Web Standards Group, the standards compliance of the forum solution was a major concern, and so Vanilla was selected. Matt Magain from SitePoint did most of the work getting the forum set up and skinned to match the WSG site - and he’s done a great job. I wasn’t too sure about Vanilla as it turns the traditional forum metaphor a little on it’s head - no forums per se, but categories instead and a very different navigation system from the norm. But over the weeks it has been running I’m slowly getting used to it, and while I don’t yet prefer it to a more traditional forum style ala phpBB, I don’t hate it anymore!
Membership of the forum is independent of mailing list/WSG membership, so if you’d like to give it a try please pop on in and say hello.

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, but I hope to fix that in the new year.

Here’s to a very merry Christmas (or other seasonal holiday if you celebrate something different) and a fantastic, standards-compliant, accessible and usable new year.

Drew McLellan’s 24 Ways - the web standards advent calendar - is back for 2006 with some great tips to impress your friends. It’s already up to day 22, with some great articles by Derek Featherstone, Andy Budd, John Allsopp, Jeremy Keith and other web superstars.

And if you need some last-minute Christmas bling on your blog, web site, email newsletter or anything else, check out these FREE Christmas icons from Clever Icons, a new stock icon site we’ve launched. Created by celebrity icon designer Anton, the Creative Starfish of the Clever Starfish team.

Happy Holidays everyone!

I’ve been way too busy to post anything substantial lately - and here’s why: I would like to present - Clever Starfish!

After nearly 7 years, my partner Dave and I have left PerthWeb and have started our own venture, Clever Starfish. Dave’s a Windows programmer so we have some software projects planned, and I will be focusing on search engine optimisation and online marketing - with a web standards view, of course!

I’d love to get any feedback about our new site. The design and initial cutup was done by Anton the Little Tree, and I did the CSS refinements, site construction and WordPress integration (the news section is powered by WordPress). Dave and I wrote the content together.

It uses ems for almost everything (except for a few things in the masthead), so the font size can be bumped up a few places without anything too weird occurring. Other than that, I’m most proud of the footprint of the site - while it looks reasonably graphical, the entire home page is only 23K which means that even on a modem it loads in under 5 seconds.

Of course, there’s always more work to be done on a site - especially a web developer’s own site - but the feedback I’ve had so far has been good.