ClearBuild in top 3 most innovative products 2007

Our massive project of the last few months ‘ClearBuild’ commissioned by simplyClear has been voted by the judges of InterBuild 2007 building show to be in the top 3 most innovative products. So I guess it was worth all the hard work!

Has the day of bespoke sites gone?

These days it is so easy and cheap to have a web presence. With numerous services from sites like wordpress which not only give you blogging services but also the ability to manage specific pages, what more could the average punter need when you have all these options at your fingertips? Has the day of bespoke sites gone I ask myself?

But, I say with relief as a bespoke web designer myself – these services don’t seem to reach beyond the small to medium sized businesses and lone bloggers. Established medium to large business must look beyond these services and require much more customisation, creativity and branded control in their sites.

This brings us developers/designers the challenge to up our game and not only produce robust managed web sites to match these free services but to realise the uniqueness of our clients and keep bespoke sites the ones that stand out from the rest.

Viewstate, forget about it?

When you come to designing applications with controls that use callbacks instead of postbacks you will quickly run into the brick wall that Viewstate won’t be your friend.

Now on the surface, not being able to rely on the current viewstate is not so hard to deal with, everytime a control’s value is changed I would save it to the db and all is well in the world. However, as I have been finding over recent projects although viewstate isn’t saved on callbacks, it is loaded… and therefor when you trigger successive callback round trips the controls previously changed will be updated with the value set at the last postback, rendering any changes useless!!

Many hours have been spent working out what was happening to reveal a very simple solution for database apps.

If you override the page’s LoadPageStateFromPersistenceMedium and add the following line right at the beginning:

if isCallBack then return nothing

your controls won’t load any viewstate changes from the last postback and the values will be left at the ones loaded from your db.

Guidelines for Writing Good Website Content

I have been aproached twice this week by people who are trying to work out why their website content isn’t working. Here is how I approach writing good content.

Here are some simple guidelines which I try to follow and which you will recognise in other sites. I hope they make sense, if you want to talk any of them through then please give me a call.

1. Hierarchy of content

You will never be able to get everything across to everyone so it’s very important to decide on the key aspects of what you want to achieve from each page. Then decide on a hierarchy.

• Make a big deal about key aspects on the landing page but keep it relatively brief and link to another more in depth page.
• You will then have space for features and other items which are useful once someone is interested.

2. Images, white space and construction

Use images to not only communicate a theme or message and attract the eye but also to create space for the eyes to breathe. This can also be achieved with white space. Give the eye space to rest.

3. Style sheets

• Set out your style sheets so that the eye is clearly drawn to the headers.
• Do you have an accent colour which will stand out on the page.

4. Pitching the Headers

Try and stay away from the ‘Who we are’, ‘About Us’ , ‘Our Products’ and ‘Our services’ kind of headers. Instead focus on what you are offering in your products or where your services stand out.

For example instead of ‘Our Products’ choose something that your product does which will remove a well felt aggravation from it’s user’s life. Then you can follow that with an explanation.

For example ‘Complete email security made easy’, ‘Is your anti-virus catching everything’ or ‘Do you carry out regular audits or inspections’

Alternatively focus on what the product does:

‘Audit software, Site Inspection…’

I have tried to keep this very brief as a quick guideline for thinking about the content which goes into your website. The content is probably the most important part of your website, getting the right headings and the right body text can dramatically help your visitors find what they are looking for (and hopefully what you are offering).