After lunch, Drew McLellan was up again to run through a Smashing Magazine style “10 Cost Effective Web Development Techniques”. Each one was a great tip about to optimise and streamline the development process and I won’t run through them all here but the ones that stood out were “Write a comprehensive project spec”, “Broadband is not a silver bullet” and “Use existing APIs”.
“Write a comprehensive project spec” refers to gaining as much information as possible about the project before starting work, in order to provide a clear goal which will help to plan out the project as well as saving time and reducing errors as the project progresses. Although it’s not possible to predict every outcome and situation which might arise throughout a project but having a clear spec will help to reduce the number of errors/problems down the line. Try to gain as much information from the client/project manager as possible by asking as many relevant questions as possible and by drawing out as much information as you can in order to make informed design and development decisions as things progress.
“Broadband is not a silver bullet” refers to optimising and streamlining your site in order to cut down on loading times for the user and also to reduce load on the server if it’s a particularly busy site. An image intensive site may look visually stunning but having a lot of images with a large file size will increase the amount of bandwidth on a server and this could lead to high costs if a site goes over the hosting limit, and could run to hundreds or thousands of pounds. Try to squeeze every bit of file size out of a site as you can, without compromising too much on quality and techniques such as the use of image sprites can reduce load by caching one image which is then positioned at different points on the site.
“Use existing APIs” refers to not re-inventing the wheel and creating systems and functionality which may already exist, or can be created easily using existing technologies. Why create a custom CMS from scratch if the desired effect can be achieved through a combination of WordPress and some custom fields? Is there any need to create a whole new shopping cart from the ground up if a combination of Ubercart and a custom php script can gain the same functionality. By utilising this existing functionality then development times will be significantly reduced which will reduce a developer’s workload and provide faster delivery on projects to the client.
Colin Hewitt from Edinburgh firm Iflookscouldkill was the local speaker and he presented an alternative process to launching projects which involved launching a site early with the core functionality and then building it up over time. His agency is moving from a design shop which delivers sites and that’s the end of the contract to working in partnership with the clients over time to help the site grow over a period of time. He cited one example where a client wanted alot of different functionality built into their site but after launching with only the core functionality, found that there wasn’t a need for all the extra stuff, which saved the client money as well as delivering a site which was perfect for their customer base. By taking this approach they are able to maintain long term relationships with clients and give real benefit to the organisations and sites that they work with.
It’s a novel approach and one that certainly is a good way of working.
The final session of the day was the one I was most looking forward to as even though it was a late addition to the schedule, HTML 5 is probably the hot topic in the web design world at the moment, and the focus of Bruce’s talk was to dis-spell some of the myths that have been circulating around HTML 5 such as “it won’t be ready until 2022″ or that it “hates accessibility”. The 2022 figure comes from the w3c’s definition of being complete but it is entirely possible to use HTML 5 today, the slight problem being that not all browsers support it and the ones that do all support different aspects of it.
One interesting development is that there is a movement to get all browsers to display errors in a consistent manner so that de-bugging markup will be a whole lot easier in the future. We all know that making sites cross-browser compatible is a big part of our job and if getting them all to provide consistent errors then it will cut down the time we spent on this process. He also demonstrated the new video tage which will enable videos to play in the browser without the need for a plug-in, and that he has created a javascript file which will detect the codec being used for the video and load correctly.
Overall it was a really good presentation and is available from Bruce’s site along with some examples, and the fact that there were very few laptops and phones out during the course of it was a sure sign that the audience were listening intently.
After the presentations were over, we all retired to the pub for further discussion and Carsonified were kind enough to open up a tab for a short while, which isn’t always the greatest idea in Glasgow! A few drinks and a chance to meet a few more people which was good, although I left before @jackosborne took them all out for Mars bars!