One of the many little pleasures of Vine is that I get to read things I would not normally have the chance to. There is no way I would fork out over £20 on a text book in a field I am neither studying nor working in, so getting these does broaden my horizons a little.

I don’t get carried away though. Also on offer was a Beekeeping for Dummies book. I don’t think I need to broaden my horizons quite that much, although seeing it on the list did make me wonder just how much of a market there is for such a book. Just how many budding beekeepers are out there?

But I digress… here is what I thought about the book:

It may be that, not being a designer or a design student, I am missing the point, but I found this book to be a bit light on hard information at the expense of filler.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a beautiful book to hold with some gorgeous pictures in it, and it is extremely well presented as you might expect from Smashing Books, but it was too lacking in substance for me. For example, of its 402 pages, 32 are taken up with the index, contents and pages that are either blank or chapter title pages. On top of that another 274 pages are just image galleries: mostly screenshots of websites or photos taken from Flickr. That only leaves 99 pages of text – and many of those pages only have a paragraph or two on pages that are otherwise blank or full of pictures.

Most of the book tells you that you need to look at things for inspiration and then gives you lots of examples of things without giving much of a clue about how to do that practically. Along the way at times the book treads a fine line between getting inspired and copying other people’s work. In fact it more or less tells you to copy from enough different places so that you avoid obvious IP infringement.

Suddenly at chapters 6 and 7 the book does what I spent the best part of 350 pages wanting it to do – giving two practical demonstrations of how to use inspiration from other websites or from more abstract sources. Up to that point I was thinking that it was all a bit ‘emperor’s new clothes’.

And yet…

I guess that if you are in the design field and the book gives you just one idea that makes a project work or gets you a commission then it is all worth it at twice the price. Just because it didn’t do what I wanted doesn’t mean that it won’t work for somebody else.

I realise this is all subjective but personally I would have welcomed a lot more chapters like 6 and 7 because I already have a source of thousands of images. Its called the internet. Having said that, the clue is in the title. It is a book of ideas and not step-by-step instructions so it actually does what it says.

Where I would quibble with the title is that it is not clear that this is a book squarely aimed at people designing websites. While somebody designing, say, fabrics, might get an idea or two it is not really aimed at them and anybody designing things other than websites would be better off with something else.

I do wonder if I am being a little unkind though. I have an architectural source book that is very similar, being little more than lots of pictures to show different aspects and styles which I find fascinating even if it is of no practical use to me. I just think that somebody who designs websites will, by definition, have access to the internet and a whole world of different pictures already.

What it reminded me of was one of those Tony Buzan memory-improving books I read ages ago. It was a 200-page hardback book. At page 33 I was thinking that it was interesting and possibly useful and then I turned the page and discovered that the book was effectively over: pages 34 to 200 were just lists of things to remember using the techniques in pages 1 to 33. Basically it was a pamphlet that had been stretched to fill a whole book.

In the same way this idea book could have contained all its information in 50 pages. But who buys 50-page books? Or 33-page books? Do we as consumers think that anything that short can’t be worthwhile and so the only way we can be persuaded to buy it is with loads of filler?

A more recent example would be Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, another pamphlet pumped up to book size, in his case by labouring the point. If anything I think that the book’s main big idea was given far less impact by being restated umpteen different ways, something a few of these popular science bokos are guilty of, especially those in the behavioural economics field.

I am not a designer. I have dabbled with knocking up logos for personal projects, but I know I will never do it as a business. As such, this book is probably not really aimed at me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway.

Don’t read this expecting to be told how to come up with ideas though. Although the author describes a bit about how and where he personally finds inspiration that is not the sort of thing that can be taught: you either have some sort of creative spark or you dont. What this book does do is encourage that creative spark and provide practical information on how to apply it. There is no point being able to create beautiful and effective logos if you can’t persuade anybody to employ you to do that.

The sort of practicalities covered are what types of software to use (and why), what types of file format to use to provide the finished article, how to behave with clients, how to make sure you get paid, and so on. That makes it sound a bit boring, but this sound practical advice is in bite-sized chunks and interspersed with practical advice on techniques to use in the actual design like using vectors, aspects of typefaces or choices of colour schemes.

In the course of the book you are told the basics of writing a design brief and contract, how to avoid getting ripped off and what to include in your deliverables, including a section on writing guidelines for the use of the finished logo. Throughout the book the emphasis is on professionalism. It looks like a really good starting point for anybody starting off as a freelance designer.

You can tell while reading this that every paragraph has come from experience and is not just theory. I’m sure that every chapter could be expanded into an entire book in itself and the author recognises this, providing references to books or online resources that would expand on any topic you felt you wanted to explore more. Possibly the most important thing the book does is to make you aware that those topics are important enough that you would feel the need to learn more about some very specific things.

Of course there are lots of pretty pictures, and examples of designs not just from the author but from other companies and designers. As you would expect and hope from a book about design it is well laid out and attractive to look at in itself, but the content is also well-organised providing a logical structured approach to the process of design. Ironically the badly-designed bits (very useful examples of what not to do) are some of most interesting.

I’m sure this will be invaluable to sombebody in this field, but even for an outside it is fascinating and should be required reading for people who commission designers’ work!

A little bit of full disclosure first: the author used one of my photos in the book, which is how I got to hear about it in the first place.   That doesn’t give me any financial interest though.  The photo is Creative Commons.  I guess I am a little well-disposed towards Giles for having the courtesy to tell me he was using the picture, which is not necessary.  He also sent me a copy of the finished book which is also not necessary but appreciated.

As it happens I thought it was a particularly poor picture of mine that he wanted to use (page 135 since you ask) which made me expect a dreadful, tatty book.  It turns out that the picture actually looks OK when printed in good quality.  The author obviously has a better eye for visuals than I do, which is why he is writing the books on design and I am just reading them.

Here is the full review from Amazon:

As you would expect from a book that preaches simplicity and usability in design, this is a very attractive book: well laid-out, uncluttered and with no waffle.

As another reviewer has noted, this is not a text book full of densely-packed detail. I have seen one of them years ago. It was a book on human-computer interfaces that was about two inches thick, with tiny text and a few black and white diagrams and screenshots in it.  Look up the word ‘daunting’ in a dictionary and there would probably just be a picture of that book.

This takes a different approach and is more like a manifesto than a text book. The most striking aspect of the book is the layout which has each double-page spread comprising a left-hand page of text and a right-hand page that is a full-page illustration.  At first I thought this could mean a paucity of content, but soon realised that it works very well, keeping one idea per page makes it a lot easier to absorb what is there.  I suspect this means a reader could easily retain more information from this book than from one with 10 times as many words but less attention to design.

I read the book in a couple of sittings, but it just as easily lends itself to dipping in and reading individual pages in isolation because they are largely self-contained, though also part of an overall structure, if that makes sense.

There are plenty of real-life examples to demonstrate the concepts in the box as well as a recurring example of a hypothetical DVD remote control to anchor each stage of the structure to something that is easy to identify with.

One real-life example is the Telewest PVR box (which has now become the Virgin Media V+ box).  I have one of those so was able to easily confirm the wisdom of that particular page.  A recurring example is the Flip video camera from Cisco which the author holds up as a supreme example of simplicity and usability.  I have subsequently used one and found that it really is that easy, giving me even more confidence in the validity of the precepts of this book.

In fact, having now experienced the Flip, I think the best way to sum up this book is to say it is the written equivalent of the Flip – it knows what it wants to do, and doesn’t risk diluting that purpose by adding anything unnecesary for the sake of it.  Yes it is a slim volume, but it is as long as it needs to be and would not be improved by adding lots of padding.

Had the book turned out to be rubbish I wouldn’t have written a bad review, I would have just not reviewed it, but I really enjoyed it.  It made me consider design in a way I had not before.  If only I had read it before designing this site eh?

So.. any good?  A few observations.First of all, I prefer the council’s approach because they didn’t mess with the RSS feed.  The County Times changed their RSS feed twice during the changeover.  I think that re-launches are best done in a big-bang manner anyway.

As for the council’s website itself, it looks OK.   It looks a bit busy, but then all council sites do. It comes with the territory.  They all have information on so many different topics and try to cram links to as many of them as possible onto the front page which they sort of have to.  They don’t know what any particular visitor might want and if they are following some sort of rule of thumb about nothing being more than x number of clicks from the front page they are going to have to flood the page with links.

Given the limitations of the job, the site is quite well laid out,  but it is just as quick to find anything out by using the search function, which is pretty effective.   I was able to get to their terse and unedifying press statement about Mark Hammond with one click.

It is not a stunning design, but I have never seen a local council site that is stunning and easy to use.

The County Times has the same problem as the council: it is a local newspaper and there all local newspaper sites look quite similar, partly down to them all being owned by the same few companies who use the same tempalte for all their titles.   Even without that, all newspapers have certain constraints and readers have certain expectations of what they will look like.

The CT site doesn’t look too bad.  It is clearer than the old site and looks prettier – though that is always a subjective matter.

There is plenty wrong with it still, but there are good reasons for the things I don’t like.   For example, too much of the front page content is ‘below the fold’.   One reason for this is the amount of space used by advertising, which I’m guessing is unavoidable given the economics of local papers.   I’m sure the same reason will account for the biggest drawback, which is the lack of content.

All newspaper websites have the same dilemma: put too much on it and there will be no need to buy the paper, put too little on it and it is not worth using.  I don’ t think the County Times have got the balance right yet.  In the printed version of the paper there are all sorts of stories that don’t seem to get anywhere near the website.  The full page about the Hugls’ vitis to Hiroshima last week, for example, or this week’s article about the affordability of homes in the district.

I can see how they do not want to reproduce them in their entirety online, but I think they are missing a trick.  They could put a very short summary online, with a note saying ‘read the full story in this week’s paper’.   I will admit that when the Argus does that it can be very annoying and frustrating, but that is only because I don’t intend to buy a copy, but it might work to generate sales – perhaps more for a weekly paper like the CT than it would on a daily like the Argus.

If you read through the web site you could easily assume that the paper is just full of stories about cars crashing on the A24, thefts from garages and barns and the odd fire, and be unaware of a lot of the content that is more news feature than news.  The newspaper itself isn’t perfect but it is a lot better than you would know from the website.

So, the main verdict must be that the website is a very poor advert for the newspaper.

Putting in some of the extra content, even just as ‘teaser’ articles would fix that.  As a twist, perhaps the full text of articles could go oline at a later date so that the site was useful as an archive resource.  That would make the site useful for all sorts of people, while also serving as a reminder that there is a lot more to the paper than car crashes and rural burglaries.  For an example, the housing development at Broadbridge Heath by Berkeley Homes has been a hot topic in the area for a couple of years, but search the site for “berkeley” and you do not get a single relevent result.

It is the same with the sections for columnists and opinion.  Go to them and the only content is last week’s column by Francis Maude.  Why not all his previous columns?  Why not the countless columns by Henry Smith, Philip Circus and Morwen Millson?

As it happens they are in there somewhere.  Search for “equitable life” and you will get Maude’s column from August 2008 about that topic.  So you can search for older columns, but not find them by browsing.

If looks were everything, I would give the site a qualified thumbs up, but the content and navigation let it down.  Where it matters the site is just as bad as it was before.  I wold be happier if they had left the website alone and modernised the paper edititon, by moving to a more practical format.

With all the decorating I am doing I will admit that it is useful to have some sheets of paper as big as 58cm x 74cm but for all other purposes it is unwieldyand impossible to read easily.  I can think of no good reason to persist with the old broadsheet format that all the daily papers, bar the Telegraph, have ditched.

In other news: the design and content of skuds.org remains as crappy as ever so I am well aware of the glass house from which I am lobbing my bricks, thank you very much.

This could be a frustrating package for anyone who really knows what they are doing, but a very good buy for somebody who doesn’t know any HTML, doesn’t really want to, and wants or needs to get a web site up and running quickly.

At first the indications were not good.  The installation was a little bit quirky, and early on in the process I spotted a few typos and mis-translations.  Nothing serious, but enough to make it apparent that this was written in German and then translated.  Mind you I have used serious expensive applications at work that have been translated much less well.  After a little bit of confusion about how to activate/registerthe program it all went smoothly and I was soon able to start using it.

The program itself opens in a fairly small window which is not re-sizable, which is not something I am used to.  Actually it does make some sense as this is not really a program like Frontpage or Dreamweaver where you design a website.  It is really more like a wizard where you choose from various options, although there are quite a lot of options.

This is supposed to be a product that lets you create websites without any knowledge of HTML so I tried to forget that I do know some HTML which was difficult at first.

The concept of this program is that you work through five steps to create a web site.

Step one is the basics: the name of the site, contact email address, basic layout and choice of templates. There are quite a few templates but they all look fairly similar. All of the designs are based on there being a banner across the top and buttons for pages being either across the top or down the left-hand side.

Step two is to define the structure: the structure is that there is a home page with further levels of detail, all in a tree layout.  I was rushing through so I just created a handful of pages and sub-pages at random, coming back to rename them later.

Step three is the main part: defining the pages themselves.  This works in a WYSIWYG fashion.  Each page comes up as a grid.  You can add new rows and columns to the grid and then drag & drop elements into the cells.  Elements could be text, images, animations, tables, videos, etc. and can either be dropped into a single cell or spread across rows or columns. After placing elements you open them to insert the details of them.

Step four is advanced settings: you can just skip this or do some tweaking of things like how the buttons and scrollbars look and also add information for a rudimentary e-commerce cart.

Step five is to upload to the Internet: obviously you need to have some webspace to upload everything to – either some sort of hosting arrangement or just the free personal webspace that comes with most broadband packages – and you need to know the ftp details (account, username, password)

I whipped through all this fairly quickly to get an idea of how it works, then went back through to populate the pages a bit more.  Although the program works in a very linear way you can go back to previous stages at any time to make changes. After about an hour of playing around I had a website all uploaded (www.circuitcity.co.uk).  Not the best website in the world, but it looks like it took a lot more than an hour to do.

As I do have some experience with HTML and more flexible (and expensive) packages I probably will not use this much for my own sites, but I would happily recommend this to anybody who just wants a website and does not want to spend a lot of cash on software.  Something like Frontpage can do a lot more, but it can also be daunting. This is quite friendly and easy, and the linear nature of it means that a relative novice can proceed in an orderly fashion.

I think this would be ideal for anybody who is not sure whether they need a website, or for somebody who just wants to get something online without the trouble of learning any HTML. I may continue to use it for one of my ‘spare’ websites just to play around with.

There are plenty of limitations, but really what do you expect for this price?  It represents good value for money in the market it is aimed at.  It may not appeal to professionals, but I don’t think they are the target market for this.  I do know a couple of people for whom this package will be ideal and I’m going to be recommending it to them to get me out of managing their sites for them!

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the results and I have only really scratched the surface of the features.  Not only that, I just ploughed ahead without looking at any of the online help that is available. Although there are limitations I have not reached them yet.

It is very easy for somebody who has some skills or knowledge of HTML, even as limited as mine, or somebody used to using well-known web-creation software to look down on a simple little piece of software like this, but actually it is quite good for what it is, and for the price.

A valid criticism is that it it limited in what it can do but what it does do it does well.  And it seems to be suitable for the sort of limited-facility webspaces that come with most broadband accounts as there is no reliance on ph, MySQL or anything like that: its all just HTML and some scripting.

I may recommend it to the Broadfield community centre.  Its so cheap I might even buy them a copy as a charitable donation.  Their web site has not been touched for a couple of years.  The problem is that, although it is a simple site, it is all done in plain HTML.  I used to keep it up-to-date, editing everything in Notepad but it can get a little fiddly, and I am a bit out of touch with what is going on there.

I always intended to show the staff there how to do it themselves, but that would mean teaching them HTML and how to use ftp packages.  WebSite X5 would, I think, be easy enough for them to use themselves and the current layout of the site would lend itself very well to the format of the templates.

In fact I would happily recommend it to anyone who wants to set up and manage a simple site for a club or small organisation, or even for personal use, where they are more interested in the content than in learning much about how the web works.

The recent upgrade to WordPress 2.6 meant that I had to do some changes anyway, and while I was at it I downloaded a slightly newer version on the Cutline theme.  I had done all sorts of customisation to the theme and to a few of the core WordPress php modules so I had to re-do all of them, and I figured I that I would take advantage of that momentum to try and do a few of the things I couldn’t work out how to do before.

All of which reminds me of a theory of mine.

Like many of my theories it doesn’t bear close examination.  In fact many of my theories are inferior to the  Theory of Dinosaurs by Anne Elk (Miss) but that doesn’t stop me.  The theory is that there is a tendency towards a correlation between the technical quality of a singer’s voice and their lack of anything to say with it.  In other words, the singers who have something of substance they want to say tend to not have the greatest voices.   All those singers with pure voices who can hit notes spot on just sing whatever someone else writes, which is normally trivial – while singers with opinions who write their own stuff have the most unconventional voices: Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Ian Dury, Billy Bragg, Johnny Rotten, Jarvis Cocker, David Byrne, Rachid Taha.

Anyway, before letting anyone have time to spot the many flaws in that theory, I think it applies a bit to blogs too.  The more I have been delving into the code of cascading style sheets, templates and php modules, the less inclined I have been to actually write anything.  It appears that I can’t concentrate on form and content at the same time.

For the record – and for my reference so I can have a checklist the next time I do an upgrade and need to remember all the bits I tweaked – the main changes were:

• Replacing the masthead text with an image
  My favourite change.  I reckon it looks much classier.
• Making several alternative images which appear randomly
  I always wanted to have a random tagline plugin but could never find one.  Re-using the header image code and having a set of alternative masthead images gives the same effect.
• Putting a title on the search box widget
  A bit of a bugger as this is in the core WP code but needs variables defined in the theme templates.
• Putting a title on the Links widget
  Doing that gave me the confidence to have a crack at the search box title
• Fixing the problem on the Recent Comments plugin widget so I can use that instead of WordPress’s built-in one.
  Temporary fix only.  It turns out that the bug in it can be worked around by turning the caching for the widget off, loading a pageand turning it back on again. Really glad about it though – I much prefer the plugin over the built-in one because it shows the start of the comment text.
• Putting a tiny bit of colour in the sidebar titles
  I hope its subtle enough to not detract from the overall purity of the design.
• Sorting out the alignment of the left sidebar
  Never noticed it before, but the left sidebar had left padding.  Justhad to change that to right padding and then change the body from having left padding to equal amounts of left and right.
• Changed the style of blockquotes
  Trivial, but this time I actually used the custom.css style sheet so if I upgrade to a later version of Cutline in the future it will keep that change.
• Fixed the problem with photo captions so they work in posts, and so that the alignment works OK.
  Harder than it should have been because the feature was added after the theme was written so the styles didn’t exist in it.  Had to whip bits from the default theme’s css to put into the theme’s css

Apart from that, I tweaked the style in the random quote widget a tad, andhad to re-do all my customisations to the header, footer, comment form, and main page templates. At the end of it I am unreasonably pleased with the results, and too busy admiring the end product to write anything.  Perhaps not to everybody’s taste, but I like it and that’s the main thing.

All very timely though – I was starting to forget what little I had learned empirically about php, html and css syntax.

For a start, while I was not looking, the hit counter ticked past the momentous but arbitrary 100,000 hits mark.  I’m still not sure exactly what Statcounter is measuring, but whatever it is it got into 6 figures this evening.

More important than that, I think I have finished playing around at last.  I have decided to stop tinkering with the layout, stop adding new photos to the pool of random header images, and stop adding more plugins.  I have also finished ploughing through all the old uncategorised posts and putting them into categories.

Just a word on the random header images though: some of them feature faces of people who might sometimes visit (Damian, Andrew R, Antonia, Spizz, Chrystal, RWS, Tony Blair – well you never know, and a few others).  The pictures do come up randomly but eventually, if you come back enough you might see yourself.  The first person to do so wins a virtual round of applause.

It works for me, because I am logged in and don’t get the anti-spam word captcha thing, but everyone else gets a 404 error. Unless they are logged in too – but who wants to go to all the trouble of creating an account and everything?

I’ll get to the bottom of it eventually. I did a couple of things to reduce spam, like renaming the wp-comment-post.php file. Maybe when I edited all the other php files to change references to it I missed one out.

If I can’t get to the bottom of it I will just have to de-activate the anti-spam word captcha thingy, but that reeks of admitting defeat so it will be a last resort.