This time last year, I was lucky enough to be at Summercamp down at the Carsonified offices in Bath and thought I’d write an update of the things that have happened in the last year and how the event has helped me in the last 12 months. Summercamp was billed as an event aimed at full-time students and founders of startup web apps who were just starting out. Places were limited to 8 only and as there was only three weeks between the event being announced and the event itself, I applied immediately and to be honest, kind of forgot about it as I didn’t really believe that I would be accepted. I was delighted however when Trista got in touch to say that I had been awarded a place.
Across the 8 of us were a wide range of skills and talents, with Gig Locator being in beta at the time and has since launched and doing well, and Rob was organising a one-day conference called Tomorrow’s Web which took place just a few weeks after Summercamp. There was a mix of designers and developers across the attendees and the sessions were also evenly spread between design, development and business/career issues, all of which were interesting in their own. Full write ups on the event are available her with part 1 and part 2.
In the 12 months since, things have changed a lot for me as I am no longer at university and am now in full-time employment and have also improved both my design and development skills over the last year. My own website has been re-designed several times since and have also learned more coding skills, focussing on HTML5 and CSS 3 and even dabbling in php!
As more of a designer than developer I was more interested with the design focussed talks and I thoroughly enjoyed Mike‘s talk through on what was then the recent Carsonified re-design and how he approached it. I also enjoyed the talks on development techniques and how to approach the task of building and testing sites, with Ryan‘s introduction to A/B testing being an interesting session.
The whole experience was brilliant and if Carsonified were to ever run it again, I would recommend to anyone to apply for a place. I’ve benefitted greatly from the experience (even playing Wiffle Ball!) and I’m sure all the other guys have gained a lot from it also.
Not even a year since the last re-design, it’s that time again. Whilst I liked the previous design at the time, it wasn’t too long before I started getting the itch to re-do it again. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the design after a while and recently found the time to re-do it again, keeping the same loose structure and style but updated slightly and less cluttered I think.
For a good while I wanted to include as much information as possible and the site didn’t always have room to breathe and there was limited amounts of whitespace, but this time I’ve tried to space things out better and provide more whitespace to display the most important elements of the site clearly. The same structure is kept as before but just slightly altered to show off the content a bit more.
The site is built using HTML5 and CSS 3 wherever possible and as such looks better in the good browsers and should gracefully degrade in the not so good ones (hello Microsoft!). IE6 I didn’t bother wasting my time with this time, very few people visit this site using that browser and it wasn’t worth my time. Instead, I served it the excellent Universal stylesheet from Andy Clarke. The site works fine in IE7 and IE8 although it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that it should have. I also upgraded to WordPress 3 and have been playing about with the new custom post types, I’m not quite there with it yet but should have them fully set up and working soon.
I also created a custom iPhone stylesheet which displays the site in a basic manner at the moment, which will improve over the next few weeks as I learn more about creating a specific iPhone stylesheet and improve on the usability and experience of viewing the site on an iPhone. At the moment, content is displayed but it needs more work to improve on the basic layout it currently has.
There’ll still be more improvements and tweaks to the site over the next few weeks as I don’t think it’s perfect and there are areas I need to work on, but I felt it was ok to release and work on the relatively small tweaks over time.
I’m currently in the process of re-designing this site and part of this process means updating it to utilise the latest HTML5 and CSS 3 elements where possible, and as a result of this I’ve used the time element in all dates such as post date and also other dates.
The format of the time element for dates is as follows:
<time datetime="2009-11-13">13 November 2009</time>
The datetime attribute has to contain an ISO 8601 date although the value can contain any date format you wish. When using this with the dynamic nature of wordpress, the following format produces a valid output for post dates:
