I was contacted today by a colleague for whome I had recently designed a static banner, she requested that I animate it, when I asked why an advert with one simple message needed animating she told me that during a presentation to her superior she was reprimanded and told it should have been! – I was stunned that a senior member of our company should have such an uninformed view of online advertising, and worse still be preaching it to their staff!
This is an unusual post for me, on-the-whole I like writing tutorials or web design posts but something recently has affected me on a personal level and I feel I need to vent my frustration. Six years ago my wife and I lost a son and since then we have tended his plot with tasteful and appropriate items, each year changing the toys for something a child of his age would love, that was until the local council ordered this to stop!
A number of web designers have decided to stop supporting some browsers and particularly Internet Explorer (IE6 to be precise), but as IE6 becomes the native browser for a number of smart phones is it right to dismiss what still can be a large and relevant section of your audience.
The long awaited release of Microsoft’s latest operating system Windows 7 was last month and finally a few days ago my copy arrived, now I can finally upgrade from Vista and hope that Windows has become what Vista was supposed to be.
Continue reading “Windows 7, i’ve got my copy – now is it any good?”
Clunky and badly designed animation has flooded the web for as long as I can remember. In the early days this phenomenon belonged to the animated gif files blinking furiously at you in an erratic attempt to attract your attention, while in comparison today’s web is littered with a mixture of gif, javascript and now flash animation. So this has made me wonder, is this animation simply a crude distraction that is degrading our web experience and masking the quality beneath, or is this what our aspiration for the web should be?
Continue reading “Just because things can animate does it mean they should!”